AHEAD builds platforms for digital business. By weaving together cloud infrastructure, intelligent operations, and modern applications, we help enterprises deliver on the promise of digital transformation. AHEAD was founded in 2007 and in 2019 merged with Sovereign Systems, and Data Blue. The services formerly available under those brands is now available from AHEAD, LLC.
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AVI-SPL
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
AVI-SPL is a digital workplace services provider that works with organizations globally to improve team collaboration through video and audio technology.
They are easily our go to company for anything revolving around VMware suite, whether that is infrastructure related, automation related, or monitoring related. It's a no brainier to get their assistance with a lot of tasks as they can competently implement complex designs. Also on the storage architecture side they are great. I'm sure there is much more but for my team we mainly leverage them in these areas.
We've gone through a few other A/V support organizations over the years. Our growth and needs have greatly changed. Prior A/V partners proved to be severely lacking in capability. It felt like playing whack a mole with snuffing out issue after issue rather than addressing the root cause of issues. Since working with AVI SPL, the number of issues we've faced have dropped immensely
The provided pre-req documentation was thorough and well thought out, making it easy to jump into the project.
The design session to gather our requirements was very helpful, Sovereign's familiarity with the vRealize product line along with diagramming our desired layout confirmed our decision to bring in assistance with the project.
When we ran into some issues with Sovereign's custom code their development team was on top of it and solved the issue in a matter of a few days.
The desk mics are a game changer. They can be moved closer to the presenter so that there is never a missed word!
The camera quality is great! It's important to us to look professional to others outside of the company and this technology helps with that.
The quick response time on technical issues. Yes, there is always a wait time to have a tech come out. But it also goes to show they stay busy because they are in high demand! Every tech from the installation to software issues that have came to the office are very informative about the software and incredibly nice, which is appreciated more than you know.
Coordination of product orders with the vendor although I think the vendor is the bigger issue. Insuring delivery time frames are met is of great importance with these kinds of projects.
Communication between scheduled project meetings. There could be more contact between meetings.
Although we've done a lot of business with AVI-SPL, the last few projects have been very bumpy and project completion schedules have been missed by a few months, causing some disruption in our ability to use the spaces as planned. This factors into getting lot of complaints from the intended end users. AVI-SPL is still one of the few large A/V subcontractors in our region that is capable of doing a multi-million A/V installation project. With limited choice we tend to go back to them given their familiarity with our organization. UPDATE: Having completed the ACC Rio Grande Campus renovation, my opinions of AVI-SPL have improved. They finished the project strong with the support of new PM that did a great job of picking up where we left off and carrying the project through to 100% completion to the Owner's satisfaction.
They had us replace the PC three times stating that the PSU was not strong enough to power the USB bus. The last PC had a 1500w PSU. The USB devices kept not working because they had too many USB devices connected. We had to hire another company to come out and fix this mistake as well. They redesigned the solution to get the features that we requested from the beginning and something that would work correctly
They have a customer support portal, which can be helpful at times, but it is limited in what you can see or do. Their internal support platform is a very high-end system, but it appears that they have not implemented it well, so data to the customer portal side is incomplete. Reports are difficult to get from the internal system, and more often have to be built manually by the account team. They cannot provide me an inventory of what they have installed, nor an inventory by ticket of what has been RMA'd and replaced. Their data management is inconsistent. we struggle to get the correct ticket information sometimes.
Having extensive pre-implementaton dialogue really made the process much smoother. We had most of our bases covered and were ready for the equipment installation/implementation, except for the previously mentioned network configuration issues that arose.
AVI-SPL is a professional integrator in the Audio Video industry. They have always been the top choice in my book! The people that work for the company will be friendly and knowledgeable. The AVI-SPL employees that come to work on your project are professional and respectful of the environment they are working in
We have seen a reduction in ticket volume in spaces recently updated by AVI-SPL.
While hard to quantify, AVI-SPL's multi-vendor support affords us peace of mind; we know that they can assist us with issues, regardless of the failure point.
Internal subjective feedback shows a positive view of the spaces AVI-SPL has integrated for us.
