Interview: Thilipan Krishnan, Office 2000

• Features

• 25/07/2021

Office 2000 [O2K], winner of the Corporate Project category of the Inavate APAC Awards 2020, recently announced a partnership with GoBright, provider of smart solutions for desk, room & visitor management and digital signage.

Thilipan Krishnan, associate VP for technologies and key projects, talks about how the partnership started: “We were first introduced to GoBright by one of our clients when we were handling an integration project for them. Later, we went and found the technology ourselves and saw its application for digital signage, hot-desking, room booking and more. This really resonated with our technology team which leads our pre-sales activities and we decided to start a conversation with GoBright. Interacting with them was good, we started to understand the scope of the solution and how it worked, and it was very clear that there were a number of applications that would help users in times of this pandemic. From there, we decided to establish a partnership with GoBright as system integrators where we would look to integrate it into our solutions.”

He continues: “This partnership helps us to better understand the products and solutions from GoBright. It allows us access to special training programmes which means that our engineers can become proficient with the solutions and of course it also provides us with favourable pricing.”

The driving force behind the partnership was O2K’s aim to deliver value for its clients. Thilipan details: “The pandemic situation is something that is always changing, and we have to address it at all times. In my opinion, social distancing and safeguards against Covid-19, these patterns will be around for a while. With this in mind, GoBright has a number of applications that can assist users. What I found interesting was the hot-desking application, which allows people to book spaces for themselves. You can automate the process so that the hot-desk space becomes operational when it senses the user is present and after the user has left it can alert the management to sanitise the space so that it is ready for the next user. These are features that can really help the Indian corporate sector navigate the tricky situation of the pandemic.”

Additionally, Thilipan believes that with GoBright the integrator can help corporate end users make the most of their spaces: “There are a number of room booking systems available on the market but the key difference of the GoBright solution is that it is cloud-based. You can book the rooms from a mobile app or your laptop or from anywhere. This means that while you are working remotely you can organise your schedule for when you are in the office to be able to make the most of your time. And of course, you can still book rooms on an ad hoc basis by checking the app and seeing what spaces are available. From a user standpoint the room booking system can allow you to really maximise your corporate spaces while still following safety regulations for Covid-19.”

Thilipan concludes: “There is a real conversation in the corporate sector about creating and designing solutions and rooms with ‘no touch’, where the system works automatically and does not rely on touch as the primary source of input. This will involve things like occupancy sensors, IoT devices and a lot more integrated together with other technology. And then we also have to consider how these systems will be managed by the end user, which means that we have to make sure these systems have to be based like cloud-based just like GoBright’s solutions are.”