12 Saturday 14.09.134
theibcdaily Innovation by cross pollination Opinion
Ian Prowse, director Vortex Communications, reviews a year in which new business has sometimes come from unexpected areas, each with its own opportunities and demands
The UK Driving Licence – Category H – lets you drive a ‘track-laying vehicle steered by its tracks’, and Vortex it seems falls into ‘Category H’. This is not to say that we bulldoze our way through life’s little difficulties like ‘customer requirements’ and ‘customer satisfaction’ – quite the contrary – and even though we might have our own ideas as to what is over the horizon, we are sufficiently agile to be diverted to pastures new. The skill is to maintain the direction of travel and not be diverted into backwater (or mire), always remembering that broadcast is our business. These diversions all add to life’s rich
tapestry and often we find ourselves with improvements and enhancements to products, triggered by customer suggestions, before they are even off the drawing board. With careful management this has led to incredible functionality and feature-sets and fortunately we seem to have avoided producing a sort of ‘camel’ which is a horse designed by a committee (phew!).
The last five years have seen a big
crossover in market sectors and with downward pressure on budgets, domestic, professional and security products find themselves being compared with full broadcast-spec devices and it can often be a close- run thing. Unexpectedly though, broadcast
equipment turns out not to be so expensive as imagined and it is not unusual for a mix of domestic mass- produced product (screens come to mind) to be incorporated in high-end systems as providing an interesting combination of price and performance – and still with broadcast quality. Our ‘track-laying’ activities have led
us into legislative areas where our timekeeping products – and in particular our FLX Timer – have brought us right to the heart of government and to the House of Commons where we time debates to very specific ‘rules’. Our video and audio distribution over fibre and structured cabling has taken us to schools and universities and into the world of patient bed-head
Ian Prowse: ‘Our timekeeping products have brought us right to the heart of government’
entertainment where our low-cost innovative solutions ensure sensible pricing for users. Our IP video and audio codec
activities, telephone interfacing (both landline and mobile) and compliance recording capabilities have brought us to the security, judicial and enforcement fields where remote monitoring and remote control are now par for the course. Just a few of the unexpected areas in
which we find ourselves. And the great thing is that product suggestions from these disparate areas feed back into our broadcast offering, so in the end everyone benefits. We have been very busy over the last
year (as usual) and on our stand in the corner of Hall 11, you will find yet more fruits of our labours – not just the products themselves but clever configurations and apps that make everything work better together. And don’t be surprised if, when we have finished explaining the broadcast application, we share some of the experience we have gained in these other fields; you never know, it might just be relevant – but in any case, it will be interesting. 11G11
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