Pan Intellecom delivers an ambitious turnkey command centre for ONGC in Mumbai. Hurrairah bin Sohail discovers how the integrator built the project from the ground up.
It is no secret that AV is almost always the last trade at site. This means that any delays on the side of other parties compound and cut into the window allotted for AV work. This oft-repeated ‘excuse’ was not available to Pan Intellecom, who served as the civil contractor, interior designer, ELV provider, IT partner, and system integrator for ONGC’s Production Operation Control Centre (POCC) in Panvel, Mumbai.
Ranbir Panesar, director at Pan Intellecom, says: “True ownership means there is no one else to point to. The success and timeliness of the project are entirely your responsibility.” This is a candid admission and one that speaks to the scale of what the company signed up for when ONGC awarded them the tender in May 2025. The scope of the project was extensive with Pan Intellecom tasked with building the POCC at ONGC’s facility in Panvel completely from scratch. This included civil works, acoustics, interiors, electrical, HVAC, UPS infrastructure, AV systems, IT networking, access control, CCTV, fire alarm and suppression, lighting management, and more.
The facility, housed in an old building, required significant civil modification ranging from acoustic treatment to interior construction before a single AV cable could be laid. Pan Intellecom built out partition walls, false ceilings, access flooring, acoustic baffles, and switchable glass partitions, while simultaneously managing waterproofing for the structure. The facility was divided into four distinct zones: an experience centre, a discussion room, a collaboration room, and the main command and control centre. Each zone came with its own brief and hence carries its own AV system, but all four spaces are interconnected.
Visitors entering the POCC are first received in the experience centre where the centrepiece is a 3m by 1.69m display comprising Christie Lumia 0.9mm pixel pitch LED tiles. The videowall is equipped with a Wavex multitouch overlay that allows visitors to interact with a custom Figma-built interface showcasing ONGC’s history from 1947 to the present day.
The integrator took on the task of content creation. Beyond the interactive timeline, Pan Intellecom also produced approximately 38 minutes of bespoke content for ONGC covering onshore and offshore operations, a film about life at ONGC, and a dedicated piece on ONGC’s initiatives and the significance of the POCC itself. The experience centre also features a physical diorama, a hand-crafted mural depicting world oil history, and five Christie DWU1400-GS and two DWU960ST-iS laser projectors for a projection-mapped immersive show, all orchestrated via a Dataton Watchout media server.
One of the challenges of the project was getting the content approved. Ranbir says: “The subject matter experts are ONGC and they know what exactly to feature in the content and what not to. We worked together for the storyboards, scripting, and voiceovers. But as is the case with content, getting final approvals and sign offs can be challenging. The content was important to ONGC, and we had to work with them to ensure that every single detail was right.”
The main command and control centre has a unique layout. It is wedge-shaped, widening toward the front where the main videowall sits. It accommodates 16 operator workstations across tiered seating.
The geometry alone makes available space a premium and the sloped ceiling compounds matters further. At the videowall end, the room reaches approximately 5.6m in height, while the rear, where the last operator row sits, drops to just 2.4m of usable headroom. The centrepiece of the space is an LED videowall measuring 14.4m by 2.4m and comprising Christie Lumia 0.9mm pixel pitch tiles. The videowall is curved to follow the arc of the room. Christie developed a flexible module for this installation to accommodate the high degree of curvature.
The videowall operates at a resolution of 15,360 pixels by 2,520 pixels, is 3D-enabled with active 3D glasses, and features an interactive touch overlay from Wavex, making it fully operable by hand thus enabling a wide range of usage scenarios. Positioning the wall within the building constraints was not without friction. Panesar expands: “When we were installing the videowall, the customer wanted us to shift it back. But both sides of the room were flanked by structural foundation pillars. We could have gone back further, but only by cutting into the building, which we would not recommend in an old building.”
The main control room has a hermetically sealed switchable glass partition which seals off the room from the outside. It transitions from transparent to fully opaque at the press of a button, providing visual privacy when needed. Aluminium glazed glass partitions with an STC rating of 45dB have been installed along the main corridor, effectively separating the collaboration and discussion room.
ONGC’s production engineers use the POCC to monitor oil wells across the country via Schlumberger’s bespoke operations management software. A total of 16 operator workstations handle intensive data. The workstations themselves are high-end units and are housed in the server room. Keyboard, video, and mouse signals are transmitted to the operators via Datapath VSN V300 KVM-over-IP encoders and decoders paired with the Ateria WorkSpace Pro application. The Datapath system operates over 10Gb LAN which was necessary given the pixel-dense, high-refresh workstation outputs.
The broader AV distribution infrastructure runs on the Q-SYS NV-21-HU AV-over-IP platform. A total of 20 NV-21-HU units are deployed across the facility as encoders and decoders, handling videoconferencing feeds, camera inputs, and cross-room content distribution.
Q-SYS Core 110f DSPs, with Dante expansion, manage audio across the command-and-control centre and collaboration room, while a QSC Core 8 Flex handles audio for the experience centre. QSC MP-A40V amplifiers power the speaker systems throughout.
The integration of T1V ThinkHub as the collaboration and videowall control layer was developed in partnership with Mindstec, the Indian distributor for both T1V and Datapath. Pan Intellecom had prior experience with Datapath from its earlier ONGC project in Delhi, and the technology stack was familiar to the client. Four T1V ThinkHub units, one in the command centre, one in the collaboration room, one on a tilted 65-in LG interactive touch table in the control centre and one in the experience centre are networked together using T1V’s MultiSuite application over the QSC network, enabling real-time content push across all three canvases. A remote user can join any of the three canvases from anywhere in the world via T1V’s cloud-join feature.
Another interesting aspect of the command centre is the use of QSC’s SeerVision AI presenter tracking system. Deployed at the podium in front of the main videowall, one QSC NC 20x60 camera with SLSV-CAM software is used to automatically frame and follow a presenter as they move in front of the 14m-wide display, without any manual camera operation.
The recommendation came from Pan Intellecom and the project consultant and Panesar is candid about its suitability for this specific environment: “For this space, I don’t think voice-based tracking would have been accurate enough. So, we proposed SeerVision and it was jointly accepted. The end result has been great. The camera tracking results in more organic meetings with great equity for all participants.”
Three Sennheiser TeamConnect Ceiling 2 tile microphones are installed in the command centre above the operator area, recessed into the ceiling. Panesar adds: “The Sennheiser ceiling microphones are slope-mounted, not suspended flat. The beams are positioned so that they are aimed straight at the operators. The performance is up to the mark and is used primarily for online and hybrid meetings.”
Adjacent to the main control centre, the collaboration room is designed for management executives who need visibility of operations without sitting in on the control floor. Its primary display is a 4.2m by 2.4m Christie Lumia 0.9mm COB LED videowall with a Wavex interactive overlay. This display can mirror the content being shown in the control centre in near real time. Executives can annotate, highlight, and push content back to the main control centre via T1V ThinkHub.
The collaboration room is also equipped with a full videoconferencing setup. A Polycom G7500 codec is integrated with two Polycom E70 PTZ cameras and two QSC NC-20x60 PTZ cameras. The four cameras are switchable during a live call via an Inogeni HDMI-to-USB capture card. It is a configuration that Pan Intellecom had not previously deployed with this codec.
Panesar elaborates: “Getting the camera setup right was complex, involving dedicated codecs, decoders, and cameras, which increased system cost. While a Zoom or Microsoft Teams-based solution would have been simpler, this architecture was driven by end-user requirements, and we delivered accordingly.”
Audio for the collaboration room is handled by QSC ceiling network loudspeakers. All components, from audio amplification and signal processing to codecs, encoders, and decoders, are housed in the server room and delivered over the Q-SYS AV-over-IP network. Microphone pickup across the collaboration room relies on 15 Clockaudio CRM-102-RF retractable table microphones, paired with a TS005RGB chairman touch control panel.
Underpinning the entire deployment is robust switching infrastructure from Cisco and Netgear. Cisco forms the core IT backbone, while Netgear switches are dedicated to the AV network, ensuring reliable and efficient system performance. AV traffic operates within ONGC’s own corporate network, with a VLAN topography keeping it away from general IT traffic but without routing through any external network.
Regarding the challenges faced by the integrator, Panesar says: “Whenever we deal with clients, our aim is their complete satisfaction. We want to make sure that we deliver on every objective. For this project, with the expanded scope of work, we had to be very detailed to ensure that the client was happy every single step of the way, from the civil works to the content and to the technology.”
Panesar adds: “While we had control over many aspects of this project, one of the variables we couldn’t control was the weather. The monsoon season came during the course of the works and actually delayed the deployment.”
Panesar concludes: “But the ONGC facility is up and running and I believe that the technology we have deployed takes the spaces to a new level, setting a new benchmark for commandand- control environments in the oil and gas industry.”