Sharp’s New Strategy, New Products, New Alliance Unveiled at Inspire Expo

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Sid Stanley

At Inspire Expo in Malta, a two day event for its European dealer community (550 dealer representatives from more than 30 countries), Sharp delivered a new converged strategy for its partner business—built on their new vision to transform the way that organisations engage with information through connected technologies.

To achieve this Sharp now combines its sales and support structure for its Document and Visual Solutions businesses across Europe to offer a complete portfolio through a single business to business sales organisation.

Sharp, like all TV and display makers, has been under pressure in the consumer business—a business that has overshadowed its profitable B2B business which consistently delivers growth. Now Sharp will concentrate on B2B and the integration of its Document and Visual Solutions business is part of Sharp’s continuing restructuring across Europe

The Sharp B2B team will work with customers, examining how they capture, process, display and share information, developing solutions which make information more applicable and more accessible, to inspire a more informed business environment.

Sid Stanley, Sharp’s General Manager, Visual Solutions Europe, took the stage at Inspire Expo to announce a European partnership with Crestron to offer complete meeting room solutions for a more effective collaborative working environment.

The partnership brings together Sharp’s range of BIG PAD interactive flat panel displays with the Crestron RL™ group collaboration solution which incorporates Microsoft Lync (and Skype for Business Room System) software.

Sharp has seen significant year-on-year growth in the interactive corporate meeting room market, as many companies recognise the importance of encouraging creativity and enhanced productivity within their work processes. Sharp is a pioneer in bringing digital collaboration to the meeting room, and is now taking its solutions to the next level with the 80” multi-touch Capacitive P-CAP touch technology.

BIG PAD

Says Stanley, “In the meeting room the needs of our customers have transformed over recent years, from a simple audio visual device requirement to one where immersive, connected technology easily contributes to productive and engaging meetings. The combination of Crestron’s experience of content and solution management systems and Sharp’s experience in the interactive display market now answers the increasingly diverse requirements of the modern workplace.”

At Inspire Expo, Sharp showed its most advanced BIG PAD, the 80” collaborative touchscreen, PN-80TC3, for the first time. Designed for professional environments, BIG PAD PN-80TC3 will transform meeting and conference rooms into creative and effective spaces where people can easily present words, pictures, video and sounds on an outstandingly smooth projected capacitive (P-CAP) touch screen, work together on one or more surfaces using intelligent pens, and two-way screen share with colleagues through their mobile devices.

BIG PAD PN-80TC3 builds on the heritage of Sharp’s range of interactive flat panel displays. It recognises up to 10 points of simultaneous touch contact with an advanced 220Hz sampling algorithm, and allows 4 people to write on the screen at the same time using Sharp smart pens, letting people write and draw to support creative brainstorms, lectures and planning meetings. Several displays can be linked together to form an enlarged touch surface with the Multi-Board functionality.

BIG PAD PN-80TC3 comes with new software to support multi-board configurations for data-intensive and critical-sharing environments and Touch Display Link 2.0 to let screen content be shared wirelessly with up to 50 mobile devices.

Go Sharp’s BIG PAD PN-80TC3

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