Powersoft’s DEVA makes Cincinnati Zoo roar
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Emphasising an innovative approach, the Cincinnati Zoo emphasises education, outreach, conservation, and giving every visitor a unique experience with wildlife that they would not have anywhere else. What the zoo lacked until recently was a reliable audio system for delivering messages throughout its sprawling campus.
“Innovation is one of our core values and something that we take very seriously,” says Chad Yelton, vice president marketing & communications, Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens. “It informs everything we do, from our sustainability program and our green initiative to how we build habitats, to the people that we hire and every event that we put on here at the zoo. The desire to innovate drove our search for a better audio and security solution, and that search led us to DEVA.”
In addition to providing pristine sounding music throughout the zoo campus, the new multi-point DEVA system also helps with communication and messaging challenges: “With as many guests as the zoo attracts, we recognised the need for the paging system that could clearly and effectively deliver messages throughout our space,” says Dutch Mulholland, IT / AV director of the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Gardens. In his hunt for a practical solution, Mulholland discovered power of the DEVA wireless multimedia device.
Mulholland’s first exposure to DEVA was at InfoComm three years ago. “I immediately saw the potential of all this in a wireless unit,” he says. “I saw it again there last year and was really impressed with its current capabilities, so we decided to investigate it as a possible solution for our security messaging needs.” Mulholland and his team built a heat map of their wireless access point coverage in the zoo and correlated that with projected DEVA coverage and determined that it would be a viable solution.
For the zoo and Mulholland, coverage is key. “We wanted to have as close to 100% coverage as possible with our audio messaging,” he says. This made DEVA’s wireless capabilities a key selling point. “With our old conventional sound system for emergency paging, it was always a fight to set up wiring, and then we’d deal with having squirrels chew through our cables, or even the horticulture destroying a lot of the cables that are in the ground,” he explains. “We wanted to get away from having our amplifier and signal processing off somewhere and go with something that was all in one and had zero cabling going to it.”
Starting with only two DEVA units to see how they would work with the zoo’s existing network infrastructure. “The first two Devas were a proof of concept, and ran them for a year and tested them on our infrastructure. They worked flawlessly, so we moved ahead with more of the product.”
The zoo went up to 50 DEVA units, just in time for its major Festival of Lights holiday event.
(Jim Evans)
