Now in its seventy-fifth year of business, Verrex is a global leader in designing, integrating, and managing the audio visual, unified communications, and IT needs for a massive range of projects and clients — from telecom system setup for small businesses to complete meeting room overhauls for large enterprises. With a long tenure of providing foundational technologies for day-to-day office operations, both the customer-facing and internal teams at Verrex know that the right power distribution and protection make or break an installation.
Last year, Verrex sought to upgrade its corporate meeting room and design the space to uniquely double as both an agile collaboration room and a lunch-and-learn room for hosted clients and potential customers to see installation options in action. However, with the room initially protected by aging UPS battery backup units, Ben Dandola-Grubb on Verrex’s multipurpose room team recognized the integrity of the room was susceptible to the same array of risks that the company assessed and treated for with customers regularly: routine battery failure, failed management units, and little management capabilities left the entire system vulnerable to the spikes, sags, surges, and other power anomalies most found in enterprise spaces.
It wasn’t just a one-room consideration for the Verrex headquarters—the office is also the hub of customer management. A proper power foundation at the home base is essential to ensure Verrex’s operations for the thousands of customers relying on its remote management offering for installations. Shawn Rabenstein, who manages Verrex’s IT services teams, explains: “Power distribution is one of the most critical aspects of supporting our customers, and if our office experiences equipment lockups, errors, and downtime, so does theirs. A reliable product is critical to our operations and our customers trust that we have that in place.”
SurgeX Backs Up Verrex’s Success Record
Seeking to upgrade their existing system in the collaboration room to a brand with a more robust backend, management capabilities, service, protection, and power distribution options, the Verrex team turned to SurgeX. With a successful history with SurgeX installs in the past, Rabenstein knew that the brand had the powerful, robust solutions needed to protect a range of AV and IT resources within the corporate office—from videoconferencing equipment to audiovisual displays.
“Supporting a collaboration space filled with many different audio, video, and sound equipment requires reliable, dependable equipment. If systems are not powered on due to UPS failure or input failure, or if there’s a lockup or constant glitching due to common-mode voltage, or if there’s noise or sags or really any interruption, it makes it impossible to do anything. From that side, it’s critical that we’re protecting everything coming in from the street—pikes, sags, overvoltage, and more—and that we’re also leveraging technology that gives meaningful output and data for awareness to maintain that defense,” explained Rabenstein.
Verrex implemented a PDU application and replacement battery backups to keep its systems online and running to protect the headquarters and the new conference room. In addition, by opting for an SX-1120-RT surge elimination unit to safeguard equipment from harmful transients and an IP-connected Axess Elite SX-AX15E power management system for additional protection and remote monitoring, Verrex swapped the dual power supply into their conference room seamlessly and with zero downtime.
A Strong Foundation for Post-COVID Growth
SurgeX grounded the freshly renovated collaboration room at Verrex HQ with 100% stability and outfitted the space with monitoring tools to learn more about power fluctuations and understanding which anomalies are causing issues. Dandola-Grubb shares, “The Axess Elite software provides meaningful reporting and statistics. We can analyze issues and resolve them more quickly as a result.”
Verrex’s Rabenstein shares a similar sentiment. “In terms of the projects I’m working on involving IT infrastructure—the SurgeX product line is great. Not only were we able to use the analytics to spec the right technology for our space, but we’re also able to monitor the power environment for changes and make adjustments or reboots as needed. On top of that, we can rest assured that the remote monitoring will help us maintain the integrity of those installations.”
While the doors to the corporate conference room swing open as partners like Verrex begin to spring into post-COVID action with educational luncheons for customers and partners on the calendar, Verrex continues to leverage SurgeX to ensure premium protection. SurgeX and Verrex join forces to deliver comprehensive power management, equipment protection, and IP-enabled products to keep anomalies at bay.
