Oblong Industries Bolsters Federal Practice with Strategic New Hire

Stephan Farrand adds long-term expertise in aerospace and defense to Oblong's Arlington, Va.-based federal team, expanding capabilities to serve defense and municipal clients


ARLINGTON, VA--(Marketwired - Nov 17, 2016) - Oblong Industries, pioneers of immersive, spatial operating environments for the new era of collaborative work, today announced it has added Stephan Farrand as Regional Sales Manager to its Federal team. Farrand, who will sit in Oblong's Arlington, VA office, is a technology expert with 16 years of experience working with military and federal government divisions to deliver software and consulting support for the aerospace and defense market.

Oblong's federal team is tasked with responding to a rising awareness of the way well-designed technology can make it easier for government agencies to communicate across geographies and areas of expertise in order to improve collaboration. The division has a strong track record of serving a wide variety of industry clients including:

  • The Defense Contract Management Agency (DCMA),which is exploring the capabilities of Oblong's unique Mezzanine spatial collaborative environment technology to coordinate activities across the agency;
  • NASA Aeronautics, which in June began to deploy Mezzanine to help its Transformative Aeronautics Concepts Program (TACP) merge traditional aeronautics disciplines with non-aeronautic advancements to realize new capabilities in commercial aviation for its Convergent Aeronautics Solutions (CAS) project;
  • The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which utilizes Mezzanine's capabilities to enable real-time situational awareness at operations centers during emergencies, connecting colleagues for collaborative decision-making when every minute counts.

Mezzanine, Oblong's flagship collaborative solution, is application-agnostic, device-independent, and requires no integration services and utilizes the government's existing infrastructure. It can display content from multiple devices of any kind, no matter where the user is located, feeding into a content-rich, visually immersive working environment, alive with data from disparate sources that can be viewed and manipulated by all participants, including those in remote locations.

"We have an outstanding solution that facilitates government agencies in connecting people, devices and data in real time so they can respond faster and make more informed decisions," said Michael Friedel, Oblong Federal Sales Director. "Stephan has a deep understanding of the challenges faced in the aerospace and defense industry and will be instrumental in communicating to industry leaders how Oblong's solutions help reduce development cycle times, lower costs and foster innovation."

Farrand added, "There's a sizeable and immediate opportunity to serve the aerospace and defense community with Oblong's forward-looking technology for collaboration. These organizations have a reputation for struggling with legacy systems and dispersed locations when it comes to working together. We have the ideal solution to help them realize cost savings and improve their operational effectiveness."

About Oblong Industries
Oblong Industries' innovative technologies change the way people work, create, and communicate. With roots in more than two decades of research at the MIT Media Lab, Oblong's flagship product Mezzanine™ is an immersive visual collaboration solution that defines the next era of computing: multi-user, multi-screen, multi-device, multi-location. Mezzanine's groundbreaking Infopresence capabilities multiply the effectiveness of distributed organizations and catalyze new, more effective, more collaborative workflows. Oblong is headquartered in Los Angeles and supplies Mezzanine systems to Fortune 500 enterprise customers and reseller partners.

Learn more at www.oblong.com, and connect via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Contact Information:

Press Contact:
Megan Parker
Finn Partners for Oblong Industries
312-329-3975
megan.parker@finnpartners.com