SharkNinja is a pioneer in creating small household appliances and cleaning solutions that fit today”s busy lifestyles by providing highly functional, innovative products to consumers. Over the years,SharkNinja has become one of the leading companies in its sector. SharkNinja’s roots date back more than a century, originating in Europe, then moving to Canada and finally settling in Newton. Massachusetts. just outside of Boston.
IMT was introduced to SharkNinja’s new headquarters opportunity through their VP of Information Services, Rob Drew.”Our biggest challenge was the coordination of a brand new building housing 700 users, and coordinating the Audio/Video with our partner IMT to get the project done on time.”
With this relocation included the need for a whole new suite of services, products, consulting and pre-sales design engineering services. From Video Walls,Digital Signage, video conferencing build-out’s, networking infrastructure, and other functionality, IMT worked with the SharkNinja team to consultatively move them to a product suite that includes Polycom, Crestron, and Extron, to name a few. “To have one partner that can work with allof the subcontractors behind the scenes was a big advantage for us. The one-stop IMT approach was critical in meeting our deadline,” said Drew.
“In the modelthat we presented to SharkNinja, we combined both the design and the build aspects of the project,” explained IMT Senior Account Manager Bernadette McCool.” We provided the products, expertise and training as a seameless package.”
SharkNinja’s marketing team utilized IMT for severaladditional projects; the first being their “iHos Space,” which is a centralized controland observation room where R&D teams can come into this virtualenvironment for real-life consumer testing by observing through one-way glass what consumers like and disilke about the SharkNinja products. “It’s a realistic mockup in our environment here. We have video cameras so we can do consumer testing in realt ime on the products.” This virtualenvironment can be streamed to SharkNinja’s London and China facilities.
Another area that IMT worked closely with SharkNinja’s marketing team was on their Planogram models, which mimics store shelves and can see how each Shark product would look in store, helping their marketing team see how people would react to these products as they w alk through these types of stores. “We can also showcase our products and see how they compare against other products,” adds Drew.
Possibly the biggest piece of the project was in the build-out of SharkNinja’s videoconferencing center. “We have a pretty large global footprint,” explains Drew. “We communicate with each other around the world and with external parties for counsel and interviews.We also use it from an engineering perspective where engineers can work, collaborate and design together through conferencing. We use it in many different ways, and one of the big benefits is reducing travel costs.”
Some of the integralpartners involved in this project are Polycom, which provided the video endpoints and infrastructure; Crestron, which provided the user interface technology for the conference room build-outs; and Extron, which provided the switching equipment for the data center racks.
Rob Drew concluded, “Bernie and the entire IMT team were truly partners for us and we ended up hitting all the timelines and the deadlines. It was very, very successfulfrom our standpoint.”
