- We're never far from the comforts of home or your office in this age of mobility. Where once the stylish and powerful traveler delegated logistics to a personal valet or executive administrator, today anyone can feel like an aristocrat if they have a bit of wireless internet connectivity and some well-chosen apps. "Siri, check my stocks, book flight and hotel for Dubrovnik, order us some takeout, and call an Uber in two hours."
Ah, the good life. It's all enabled by technology, right? Is there any need for human intervention?
Well, dear reader, I think you in particular know that the answer is most certainly a resounding, "Absolutely."
It's all well and good to plug a few things in an touch some buttons, but it takes a bit more finesse to optimize a system for those with mission-critical dependence on communications, collaboration, presentation, and production technology.
To whom can a "C" level executive turn to help integrate disparate technologies to work together whether at a Fortune 500 company, a university, or in post production facility?
"When the chips are down and the need to get your message across is high, VCA is there," explained Dave Berlin, president of VCA, which has offices in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. "We work on a lot of mission-critical projects, and we define that simply as, 'If your job depends on it, then it is mission critical to us.'"
One might easily guess that with locations like those, VCA probably services just a few big names in the corporate, higher-education, and broadcast markets. Then, with that fact established and overlaying the 42 years the company has been in business, it's fairly logical to assume that VCA supports its clients globally.
But, like all the best who provide service and support, VCA operates with a humble precision that lets the clients shine without a lot of bragging about the proverbial man behind it all—Dave Berlin, who continues to build on what his father, VCA founder and CEO Al Berlin, started. A company based on values, with a code of ethics, a credo which very much stand today, with an organization that boasts many team members whose years of service number in the decades.
"I joke that if you make it two years at VCA, you'll be with us for a really, really long time," Dave Berlin said. The stats from a recent in-house survey support that notion. Evidently, some 95 percent of VCA employees see opportunity for advancement in the company, and 99 percent are proud of the work that they do and the firm does.
All that said, VCA is taking its knowledge and vast body of work and creating a new external presence to let people know who they are and what they do, this includes an extensively revamped website. The company was founded as "Video Corporation of America" and has enjoyed the URL vca.com for decades. However, it does not capture the essence of where VCA is going. So while the company's name will remain the same, the URL has changed to vcaglobal.com.
How does VCA, whose engineering, project management, and help desk services are primarily located in the Northeast, do it? They are propagated by site survey teams, and installation and service partner firms worldwide, many of whom they have worked with for decades.
"It comes down to how we provide service and the nature of the products we're selling," Dave Berlin asserted. "When you talk about UC and bridging 7,000 or 15,000 virtual and real meeting rooms for a client, all those people aren't in New Jersey or New York. The support and diagnostics for many of the systems VCA is providing can be done from anywhere in the world. When combined with their strong network of partners globally, the best local service can also be provided. What our client wants and what we deliver is the proper skilled technician to show up in a timely way armed with the information needed to be successful." Because of VCA's history of being such a strong regional player, and its name being domestic, many people didn't think of them as being able to deploy well nationally or globally.
Sometimes you have to be literal to go global, it seems. "We built the VCA brand in the New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania region. However, many of our clients are global enterprises that continue to carry our company further into international territory."
