F5 Digital Media Signage & Video

Background

In March 2023, I joined F5 as the concierge in their Customer Engagement Center (CEC) / Briefing Center. Part of my role was to focus on upgrading our digital signage systems to keep costs down, provide flexibility in an ever-changing environment, and ensure we could show high-quality visuals to customers. 

The CEC has many customer-facing screens, including: 
  • A large 32:9 display in the lobby
  • Standard 16:9 displays in our 4 briefing rooms
  • Smaller 16:9 displays in our 3 phone rooms

​Each of these displays had slightly different needs, and would need to be handled accordingly!
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F5 is a technology company providing application delivery and security solutions.
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F5's Customer Engagement Center (CEC), AKA our Briefing Center, is located at the top of the F5 Tower in Seattle. Here, we host meetings with agendas tailored to customer's needs, giving them the chance to speak directly with our product experts and executive leadership.

Challenges

The digital signage vendor that my team was using at the time struggled to provide solutions that could meet our needs. Some of our most frequent issues were...
Scalability
The vendor's toolset also struggled to work with most images; if the logos were not square, they were displayed incorrectly. Even transparent images appeared with white borders, and long/tall logos were displayed with a strange offset.
Flexibility
The vendor's toolset offered very few customization issues, meaning we couldn't adjust the font, text size, placement, or color.
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Situations like these happened all the time for customers with names over ~30 characters.