How Natilik uses Verkada to create a frictionless guest experience, streamline workplace operations, and show customers what modern buildings can look like in practice
Background
When a client visits Natilik’s office at Devonshire Square in the City of London, the experience starts before they walk through the door. They receive a pre-registration email, check in through a branded digital guest experience, and are welcomed into a workplace where the technology Natilik recommends to customers is already working in practice.
For Natilik, that is intentional.
Natilik is a global technology solutions and services provider with expertise in Networking, Cyber Security, Multi-Cloud, Collaboration and Customer Engagement solutions. With more than 200 people and clients and customers across retail, manufacturing, entertainment, finance, legal, and hospitality, Natilik helps organisations modernise the environments where their people work, collaborate, and connect.
A core part of Natilik’s go-to-market strategy is simple: they use what they sell. When sellers and technical teams experience a technology every day, they can speak to it more naturally, demonstrate it more credibly, and connect it to real customer challenges.
That philosophy shaped Natilik’s approach to Devonshire Square. Rather than building a dedicated showroom, Natilik embedded its recommended technologies throughout the workplace itself. The result is what the team calls the “Living Showcase” — a live environment where clients and prospects encounter Natilik’s technology in practice, not just in a presentation.
As Natilik refreshed the office and continued developing its Modern Buildings proposition, physical security and guest experience became a natural part of the conversation. Cameras, access control, and visitor management were no longer just back-office systems. They were part of how a modern workplace should feel and function.
The Opportunity: Creating a More Connected Workplace Experience
Natilik’s previous systems supported the basics, but the team saw an opportunity to create a more seamless, integrated experience at Devonshire Square. Cameras, door access, and visitor management each operated separately. The legacy camera system was used primarily for compliance, including monitoring fire door exits. Door access relied on physical key fobs, and visitor management involved more manual steps than Natilik wanted for a client-facing environment.
For a company that regularly hosts clients, partners, and events, those details mattered. Employees sometimes forgot to pre-register guests, visitors signed in manually, and reception teams had limited visibility into who was onsite. Natilik could record when a guest arrived, but there was not an easy way to close the loop when that guest left.
“Guest management wasn't reflective of the Natilik experience,” said Kelly White, Chief People Officer at Natilik.
Devonshire Square is more than Natilik’s office. It is also one of the company’s most important customer-facing spaces. Prospects and partners visit to experience the technologies Natilik recommends, and the team wanted every part of that visit — from pre-registration to arrival to movement through the office — to feel polished, modern, and intentional.
"When we looked at the market and how we're trying to position ourselves, we wanted to ensure we were using a industry leading solution," said Rob Eldridge, Security Director at Natilik.
Why Verkada?
Natilik first encountered Verkada when Leigh Bialik, Chief Business Development Officer at Natilik, saw the platform in action at Cloudflare’s offices. The experience immediately stood out.
Verkada offered more than a camera system. It brought cameras, access control, visitor management, AI search, and operational visibility together in one cloud-native platform. For Natilik, that breadth fit naturally into the conversations their clients were already having about modern buildings, hybrid work, and workplace transformation.
Customers were increasingly looking for ways to modernise access control, improve visitor experience, reduce infrastructure complexity, and make their buildings more intelligent without adding more disconnected systems. Verkada gave Natilik a practical way to connect those conversations.
The team was especially drawn to Verkada’s AI capabilities, including natural language search, Person of Interest alerts, face blur, and proactive alerting. For customers used to legacy systems, the difference was clear: less infrastructure to manage, faster access to information, and new capabilities that can be delivered through the cloud.
As Eldridge put it, “The day you get Verkada is the worst it will ever be.”
The Solution: Cameras, Guest, and Access Control at Devonshire Square
Today, Natilik uses Verkada at Devonshire Square to support both day-to-day workplace operations and customer demonstrations. Verkada cameras provide visibility into key areas of the office, including reception and entry points across Natilik’s floors, while Verkada Command gives authorised users a searchable view of activity from a desktop or mobile device.
Verkada Guest is deployed at reception to streamline the visitor experience. Through the Outlook integration, employees can schedule meetings and events directly from their calendar, visitors can pre-register before arrival, and hosts are automatically notified when guests check in.
Natilik is also deploying Verkada Access Control, with wireless locks planned as the final phase. Once complete, the deployment will replace the office’s legacy key fob system and allow Natilik to manage access more flexibly at the room level, including sensitive spaces such as server rooms.
A Living Showcase for Customers
One of the biggest benefits of Natilik’s Verkada deployment is that Devonshire Square now serves as a live showcase for the platform.
For Eldridge and his team, that changes the dynamic of customer conversations. Rather than relying on abstract explanations or staged demos, they can show Verkada working in their own office environment.
“The main purpose of anything that we install internally is to be able to showcase and demo that to external clients,” said Eldridge. “Having a system means we have our own live demo to provide access or demonstration capabilities whenever we like. When a client says, ‘How does that work?’ we can quickly jump onto an instance and show them directly.”
That authenticity is central to the Devonshire Square Experience. When prospects visit the office, they encounter Verkada before anyone formally introduces the platform. The arrival experience itself becomes part of the demonstration, showing how technology can make a workplace feel more polished, connected, and easy to navigate.
A Better Experience for Guests, Events, and Teams
For White, the goal was to balance hospitality with compliance. Natilik wanted the arrival experience to feel polished and welcoming without adding manual work for employees, visitors, or reception teams.
“The main reason was to provide an amazing experience for our external partners and clients,” said White. “We wanted to make this as frictionless as possible while also staying compliant.”
With Verkada Guest, visitors can pre-register and check in through a branded digital experience, while the system automatically notifies their Natilik host at arrival. Reception teams spend less time managing manual processes and more time creating the warm, welcoming experience Natilik wants clients and partners to have.
That matters for everyday meetings, but it becomes especially valuable during larger events. Natilik regularly hosts customers, partners, and community groups at Devonshire Square, including events with 50 to 100 attendees. With Verkada, the process is faster, more consistent, and easier to manage.
Verkada has also helped Natilik simplify day-to-day operations across multiple floors. Authorised users can view key areas from a single interface, whether they are at their desk or away from it. That helps with simple but important workflows: seeing when someone arrives, understanding activity around entry points, and supporting visitors or deliveries without relying on disconnected tools.
As Access Control comes online, Natilik expects to further streamline how employees, visitors, and authorised personnel move through the office. Mobile credentials will reduce reliance on physical key fobs, while room-level access will help the team better manage sensitive spaces and visitor movement.
Across those workflows, the goal is simple: reduce the manual steps employees and reception teams have to manage, while making the experience feel smoother for everyone who comes through the office.
Expanding Customer Conversations Beyond Security
Using Verkada internally has changed the way Natilik talks to their clients.
The platform gives Natilik a practical way to show how physical security can support a wider set of priorities, including safety, compliance, operational efficiency, workplace experience, and infrastructure modernisation.
That is particularly valuable in industries like manufacturing, where customers are often looking for ways to improve safety and reduce operational risk. In one example, Natilik worked with a manufacturer exploring advanced ways to monitor its sites. Verkada opened up a more practical conversation around PPE compliance, after-hours site visibility, and proactive alerts.
The initial use case focused on identifying whether workers were wearing high-visibility jackets or hard hats. From there, the team expanded alert policies to flag unknown individuals onsite outside working hours. Almost immediately, the system captured an unknown person on camera at 3 a.m., providing clear footage that could be used to create a Person of Interest profile.
For customers, those moments help make the platform tangible. Verkada is not just about reviewing footage after an incident. It is about using AI and connected workflows to identify risks earlier, search faster, and act with more context.
Other capabilities, including AI-powered search, face blur, video sharing, Person of Interest alerts, PPE detection, slip and fall alerts, and Command Connector, have helped Natilik expand conversations beyond traditional video security.
For customers with legacy on-premise systems, the infrastructure story is also compelling. Verkada helps reduce reliance on servers and complex local infrastructure, while cloud-based management and automatic updates help customers avoid some of the operational and security challenges associated with older systems.
A Partner Relationship Built on Collaboration
Natilik’s decision to lead with Verkada comes down to both the product and the partnership. For Bialik, the strength of the relationship shows up in how the teams work together in the field — from customer opportunities to joint activity and partner enablement.
“Culturally, they’re a great bunch,” said Bialik. “They're willing to engage and work in tandem with us. Working with Verkada is effortless.”
For Natilik, that matters because Verkada’s value often expands over time. A customer might begin with cameras, then quickly see opportunities around access control, visitor management, alarms, environmental sensors, or workplace analytics. The stronger the partner enablement, the easier it becomes to guide customers through that journey.
As Bialik put it, Verkada helps “make it easy for partners to articulate the power of the platform.”
Looking Ahead
Natilik’s Verkada deployment is still expanding. Access Control installation is underway at Devonshire Square, with wireless locks planned as the final phase. Once complete, Natilik will be able to demonstrate cameras, Guest, Access Control, and connected workflows from its own office environment.
For Eldridge, one of the most exciting opportunities ahead is workspace utilisation. Many customers, particularly in finance, insurance, and legal, are rethinking how their offices are used in a hybrid working world. They want to understand which spaces are occupied, when employees come in, how collaboration areas are being used, and whether their current footprint still matches how people work.
By running Verkada internally, Natilik can show those possibilities in practice. Devonshire Square is not just a place where customers hear about modern workplace technology. It is where they experience it firsthand.
