Fresh Perspective, Smart Solutions

CCOMM Integrated Technology Services
Written by Ryan Cartner

CCOMM Integrated Technology Services is a technology integration firm that specializes in audio-visual collaboration and telepresence solutions. “We help to optimize the way that organizations use technology to communicate in the workplace,” says General Manager of Sales and Marketing Ian Walters. From its headquarters in Toronto, the company serves customers across Canada.
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CCOMM was officially established in 2011. The founder’s vision was to build an elite technology-focused integration firm in Canada at a time when the vast majority of companies were focused on more traditional solutions. CCOMM concentrated its acquisition of talent and resources around this model and soon brought an exceptionally strong technical skill-set and a great deal of international project experience to the Canadian marketplace.

In the beginning, CCOMM operated specifically within the Toronto market, but it quickly expanded by adding a location in Calgary. Today, the company has a presence across Canada from coast to coast with offices in Vancouver, BC and Hamilton, Ontario, and partners across Ottawa, Montreal and St. John’s, Newfoundland. Each location is operated by an expert group of designers, engineers, installers, tech support and helpdesk teams, and more. The company often travels to remote sites when necessary and is involved in a number of international projects as well.

One of the stronger partnerships that CCOMM formed in its early days was with an innovative Norwegian engineering company called Cyviz. It had a history in pioneering visualization, simulation, and visual processing technology that perfectly suited CCOMM’s ideals. That company offered a very powerful visual collaboration toolset that was not yet available in Canada, and CCOMM’s leadership decided to offer that product in the Canadian marketplace.

By making this platform available to its customers, CCOMM established itself as an exceptional partner in providing businesses an opportunity to improve their collaboration capabilities. The company began rolling out this and similar state-of-the-art communication environments, making itself stand out in the eyes of Canadian customers and partners.

The company has grown significantly, earning a reputation and a great deal of recognition in its industry. It was one of the first companies in Western Canada to configure and install Microsoft’s Lync room system in 2013. That platform represented a new way of using technology in business, and CCOMM was at the forefront. The company has since helped many businesses integrate this toolset, and as Microsoft continues to aid corporate communication and collaboration with further innovations, CCOMM is keeping pace and adapting its skills alongside.

Barco is a leading multinational technology company that develops visualization and collaboration platforms. CCOMM has been recognized as one of Barco’s top three integration partners for control rooms. A control room is the central hub where information and data from throughout an organization can be displayed on large screens in real time so that specialists can monitor processes and react to emergencies. These highly sophisticated systems must be able to collect data from a wide range of sources throughout the organization and communicate them to people within the control room, but also to enable collaboration with those outside the room such as people in the field, management, executives, and more. Control room systems are extremely complex, but CCOMM has earned its reputation as a trusted partner to businesses that depend on them.

Visual communications technology has applications in nearly every industry. CCOMM works in energy, utilities, biomedicine and healthcare, engineering, manufacturing, security, banking and finance, retail, and agriculture among other areas. The applications for CCOMM’s services within these industries and beyond are vast but can include anything from working on purpose-built visualization rooms for engineers to building complex control centers, enterprise-wide deployments of video conferencing systems, and much more. The company’s true value is that it can provide tools that will enable and enrich the interactions between people, and between people and information.

“We offer a toolset that allows a business to interact with its people and its data across an entire organization in a far more powerful and meaningful way,” says Walters. “That’s technology integration. That’s what we do.”

CCOMM will look at all of the in-house software and hardware systems that enable a business to do what they do and to communicate with their staff and their partners in the way that they do, and enrich that experience by helping them come up with new, more efficient ways of doing those things more effectively.

CCOMM helps companies by developing fully customized interface systems to connect people to people, people to data, and people to machines. It can connect entire enterprises by applying corporate communication and collaboration systems with physical video walls, digital signs, distributed audio solutions, operator workspaces, and much more. In industrial environments, it can connect operators to equipment through data analytics. “We want to come up with the most effective way,” says Walters, “to communicate information so that people can interoperate with each other and with machines and assets.”

One often overlooked aspect of effectively integrating a communication and collaboration platform is good quality audio. Despite audio and video elements being equally prevalent in CCOMM’s industry, there is an extraordinary gap in audio engineering expertise. “The ability to program and optimize spaces for an audio experience is very lacking,” says Walters. “Oddly enough, when there’s a lot of fancy tech in there, the one problem they have is that they can’t hear other speakers very well. The whole collaboration objective falls apart when the area and the technology are not optimized for the best audio experience, and we have an extraordinary skill set there.” By providing a high quality audio and video experience, CCOMM can help an organization to significantly improve its efficiency and productivity.

The company also offers a wide range of ancillary services including consulting and custom design. For large-scale collaboration infrastructures, many organizations would rather not own and maintain these complicated systems in-house, opting instead to hire experts who are able to maintain uptimes, keep systems updated, and make sure everything is running optimally so that it is available when needed. For these customers, CCOMM can manage the system remotely.

The company has been able to stand out from competitors by taking on technologically challenging projects that many firms cannot or will not take on. While many companies can roll out commodity systems, customers often have unique needs that are incompatible with standard implementations.

Any number of customizations might be required to integrate a new solution, particularly in large organizations with existing communications infrastructure or specialized rooms with legacy or nonstandard equipment. Often, there will be widely varied facilities across the organization, each with one-of-a-kind requirements, and the platform will need to be completely customized in order to work. CCOMM’s creativity and expertise has enabled it to solve these challenging problems repeatedly.

As legacy technology is phased out in favour of newer network-based solutions, technology integration companies are going to be depending on entirely new skills. These newer and more advanced infrastructure technologies are central to CCOMM’s expertise, and that will enable the company to offer more effective solutions while competitors lag behind.

CCOMM is committed to providing the most advanced and highly customized communication and collaboration solutions. “To us, it’s important to have the respect of our clients and our partners,” says Walters. “When they come to us saying that they want us to be on a project with them, it’s because they know we can help them deliver it successfully. That’s a significant achievement for us. We’ve differentiated ourselves; we’ve established trust; we’ve executed to the level that we’re happy with. These are things that we’re hoping to achieve every single time that we go out and interact with a client.”

Visual collaboration and communications technology evolve very rapidly. The way that businesses collaborate internally, as well as with partners and customers is constantly in flux. As the industry continues to innovate and advance, CCOMM will remain a very important partner to Canadian businesses. “We have an incredibly rich skill set, and there’s so much changing and merging in this space that we’re going to become very important to businesses going forward,” says Walters. “We’re a strong team, and we’re here to help, so get to know us!”

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