As workplace expectations shift across Asia Pacific, DVI is expanding beyond traditional integration to combine analytics, signage, and managed services. Hurrairah bin Sohail explores what this means for the integrator.
The remit of an integrator has expanded significantly in recent years. Simply bringing together disparate pieces of technology and making them function is no longer enough. Organisations across Asia Pacific are now asking how technology can support outcomes, shape workplace culture, and create experiences that encourage people to engage more deeply with the spaces they inhabit.
End users have begun to view technology through this broader lens and integrators have had to rethink what their role looks like in practice. This shift forms the backdrop to the evolution of DVI and the development of its Athena product suite, which reflects a growing convergence between AV, workplace analytics, and managed services.
For DVI, the origins of Athena were an organic response to a client request that revealed a much larger opportunity. Tanish Dhillon, general manager at DVI, explains that the journey began with a very specific challenge around understanding how office spaces were being used: “A few years ago, we were approached by a client with an interesting requirement for occupancy data. We decided to work with them on it, and that slowly evolved into its own division called Workplace Technology Solutions (WTS), a separate business unit within DVI.”
Traditional AV deployments had always been about enabling meetings and communication, but the conversation was increasingly moving toward what could be learned from those systems. Dhillon continues: “We found a major gap where people were no longer just talking about AV; they were talking about the analytics you can pull from meeting rooms, collaborative spaces, and hotdesking environments. That insight led to the launch of Athena Analytics, which started life as a dashboard that aggregated data streams from meeting room devices and gradually evolved into something closer to intelligent asset management.”
The Athena suite has been broadened recently with the launch of Athena Signage, DVI’s take on an optimised signage system. Again, the move is geared to address market needs. Dhillon elaborates: “The gap we saw was a lack of scalability. A lot of signage solutions are still on-premise, and while cloud options exist, they are not easy to scale in a meaningful way. Our biggest differentiator is that we are hardware agnostic. You can run Athena Signage on a browser, a mini player, a PC, or even a videowall. The goal is to create a flexible and integrated experience rather than forcing the client into a specific hardware ecosystem.”
That flexibility is also reflected in how the platform is deployed commercially. Athena Signage operates primarily as a software-as- a-service offering with monthly or annual pricing, allowing organisations to adopt it in a way that aligns with their operational models. Implementation is designed to be straightforward. The system is intended to function as a plug-and-play solution, reducing the complexity and cost often associated with deploying digital signage and analytics platforms across large estates.
However, the significance of the Athena suite within the DVI ecosystem extends beyond signage or analytics in isolation. The platform has become the foundation for DVI’s broader managed services strategy. Dhillon explains: “Athena is essentially a platform made up of several modules. Signage is one part, and workplace technology is another, which includes asset management capabilities. What we are doing is packaging this into a managed service platform where our support team can align much more closely with a client’s daily operations.”
In practical terms, that alignment is designed to simplify how AV issues are identified and resolved within enterprise environments. DVI has positioned Athena to work alongside existing IT reporting systems. Dhillon expands: “AV is quite unique compared to something like a laptop or a server. When a meeting room goes down, it impacts multiple people at once. That’s why we integrate with ServiceNow. When a client raises a ticket in Athena, it can be pushed directly into the ServiceNow environment, but we still capture valuable UC and Microsoft Teams room data. That allows us to see correlations between call quality and device performance. We are not trying to disrupt the existing IT infrastructure; we want to coexist and complement those platforms.”
Within DVI, the evolution has also influenced how the company structures its own business. The Athena suite is closely tied to the formation and growth of Workplace Technology Solutions as a distinct unit, allowing the organisation to explore service-driven models without creating conflicts with its core systems integration activities.
Dhillon describes the reasoning behind the move: “Workplace Technology Services has grown into its own business unit over the last two years partly to avoid conflicts of interest with our main integration business. At the same time, we wanted to diversify and build larger service offerings that go beyond installation and actually drive adoption.”
Behind the scenes, a significant development effort supports the ambition exemplified by Athena. DVI’s development hub in Indonesia currently houses around 30 developers focused on building and expanding Athena’s capabilities. Yet despite the increasing emphasis on software and services, the company still sees its identity as rooted in integration. Dhillon notes: “We are still a systems integrator at heart, but AV is increasingly being grouped under the broader category of workplace technologies. Ultimately, everything comes back to the user experience from the moment someone walks into the office.”
That focus on experience is closely tied to the uncertainty many organisations now face when planning their workplaces. The assumptions that once guided office design have been disrupted by the rise of hybrid working models. Dhillon believes that this uncertainty is one of the main drivers behind the demand for analytics-led platforms such as Athena. He says: “Clients are expanding, but the old playbook for deciding how many desks or meeting rooms are required is effectively out the window. There is no longer a unified consensus. Some companies want a full return to the office, while others remain largely remote. Because of that, the conversations now revolve around two things: getting reliable data to analyse how the workspace is being used and improving the overall workplace experience.”
In practical terms, that can involve addressing challenges that were not previously visible at scale. Dhillon points to examples such as employees reserving or informally occupying hot-desking spaces for long periods, or organisations wanting to make the office environment more appealing so that people choose to come in. “Clients often ask how they can stop people from hogging hotdesking areas or how they can make the office a more techenabled place that people actually want to be in. We use sensors to provide anonymised data that can be shared with HR or real estate teams, helping them understand behaviour and improve both culture and workplace habits. AI is moving so quickly that everyone is essentially trying to stay adaptable.”
Looking ahead, Athena is expected to expand further beyond its current capabilities. Dhillon outlines the direction of travel for the platform’s next phase: “Right now Athena is primarily an analytics and signage platform, but the next stage is about improving the entire ecosystem. That includes areas like hot-desking, room booking, and visitor management within a single platform. Our next evolution will be much more AI-driven, with the goal of optimising decision-making across the workplace.” Image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com