"Twenty-five years ago, I started in this industry by selling overhead projectors from the back of my car,” begins Tim St. Louis, EVP of Sales and Marketing at Sharp’s Audio Visual. “Today, we have a broad spectrum of skill-sets amongst our staff—from Microsoft certified professionals to Infocomm CTS-D and CTS-I certified technicians—who have collectively transformed our audio visual company into a maturing IT organization.” By leveraging technology and capitalizing on an accretive business expertise of almost one hundred years, this Canadian Audio Visual giant has undergone a sea change in the recent decades to make technology an integral part of their organizational fulcrum. Sharp’s offers a plethora of solutions that are tailored to meet their client’s specific audio visual (AV) system maintenance requirements and conform to their budgetary allocations. Providing an ‘Exceptional Experience’ is the top strategic priority for the firm and they are constantly pushing the envelope to assist customers in the best possible way.

Taking center stage on Sharps’ Managed and Professional Services portfolio is Rapid Care, a solution tailored to alleviate performance and maintenance concerns in an enterprise AV/IT environment. Following the tenet—minimize system downtime and maximize system performance—Rapid Care’s three-pronged approach toward performance and maintenance of audio visual systems offers high levels of scalability to business use cases. First off, Rapid Care Basic is Sharps’ entry-level offering and is targeted at AV systems that wouldn’t have a prominent impact in case of failure. Whereas Rapid Care Plus is an intermediate offering designed for critical systems, which require pressing resolution. The third, Rapid Care Elite is Sharps’ premier product that is built particularly for mission-critical systems that require immediate attention and urgent restoration of full functionality, in order to negate disruption of organizational efficiency.

Sharp’s is also an Authorized Devices Reseller of “Microsoft Surface Hub” in Canada. Surface Hub has become a key offering for Sharp’s, leveraging organizations’ investment in the Skype for Business UC platform and addressing the much-needed case for uniformity in AV system clusters. Bringing more clarity, St. Louis recounts the customer success of a large finance company that was grappling to achieve uniformity among its communication systems—mobile, workstation, and meeting room environments. Essentially, the organization’s meeting room communication system showed significant disconnects in the user experience when compared to its mobile and workstation counterparts. With its knee-deep knowledge and prowess in the AV industry, Sharp’s entered the scene and leveraged its integrated Microsoft solution and eliminated the existing disparity by a large degree. “Our solution brought their entire unified communication system from mobile platforms to desktops and meeting spaces under the same umbrella,” notes St. Louis.

Having chronicled several such success stories with its customers, St. Louis says organizations that endeavor to stay nimble should not stop at adapting to consumer demands but must also pay proper attention to technological advancements. On its part, Sharp’s has been very good at anticipating market demands and investing in the right products or solutions, and also in hiring the appropriate workforce to help its customers. St. Louis’ love for sports also mirrors in Sharp’s sales and marketing approaches, as he emphasizes on a strategic playbook to be the right business navigating tool. The company’s willingness to look for new and unique ideas helps Sharp’s navigate through uneven terrains that occasionally occur throughout the course of business.

A member of the Global Presence Alliance (globalpresence.org), Sharp’s can facilitate business opportunities coming from outside of Canada and their local customers needing assistance globally. Sharp’s also has plans to grow their relationship with Microsoft beyond Surface Hub in order to provide holistic ecosystem solutions to its customers.