INTERVIEW: GRAHAM FRY, AVSNET
running all the retail outlets. There are also elements of healthcare and elements of education and government.
What level of market penetration do you currently have? It’s such a big market. In terms of market penetration I’d say it’s still quite small but it’s growing all the time. With some of our customers we’re perhaps looking at 10% of the IT budget through AV and videoconferencing, whereas elsewhere – around LAN, WAN and unified communication – we’re probably nearer 60-70%. Although we’ve grown very
healthily we’ve got a lot more market to aim at and that’s one of the really exciting things for us. We’re doing more with our existing customer base and that’s fuelling a lot of growth, and we’ve always been good at finding new business and having great references to go out and win that business. At the moment we’re doing more with the existing base and finding more customers who we can do more with – it’s a double attack essentially.
Where do you see the market heading over the next few years? Bring Your Own Device is fuelling quite a few conversations at the minute. Other trends include Microsoft Lync, Cisco – which won’t go away because it’s too big – and then there’s also my speciality, videoconferencing. That’s the technology I’m closest to. Disruptive technologies such as video are definitely looking like the way forward. It’s an area where some sort of hosted or managed service makes a lot of sense. There is big growth in those areas and it’s a very hard conversation: only the largest of our customers are actively looking to deploy a lot of videoconferencing infrastructure on site. It’s definitely an area where video’s growing, but it’s growing at the desktop. It’s around the network and managing that video which is more what customers are asking us to do these days rather than deploy large amounts of infrastructure. It’s only the top 10% of our
customer base that like that model: it’s generally financial companies and very large corporates where security requirements and the sheer scale they have make that financially a good answer.
Is there anything else you would like to highlight? Lync’s the really interesting thing – there are lots of companies that are rolling it out and there are less that are moving to it as full voice. Probably the only other area that’s developed a lot recently – more on the traditional side – is large videowalls. More of our customers want some form of command and control centre that links with videoconferencing, whether it’s disaster management or just understanding what’s happening on their networks. These customers want a hub they can go to and see all their different data in one place. Other than that I don’t think our portfolio’s going to expand massively. We’re concentrating on enhancing our capabilities in areas around Lync and the managed service through a proactive
Graham Fry –
a brief biography Graham Fry founded avsnet (formerly AVSolution) in 2005. He has a strong technical background and combines it with a broad knowledge of unified communications technology, network management and data services
AVSolution rebranded in July 2012 as the company began to focus more on collaborative unified communications
Early 2013 saw avsnet acquire communications company Besttel
service model. But we’re not pushing that hard into some of the other areas that the larger IT companies are. We’re finding that as new technologies come out, the larger companies – such as the likes of Cisco – can almost be market making and the rewards are very slim because they’re highly competitive
new markets; the more traditional technologies that businesses rely on, like LAN technology and others, are almost forgotten. So there’s a lot to aim at out there, looking after businesses and looking after what’s absolutely core today.
www.avsnet.co.uk ONLINE EXTRA
Graham Fry discusses how to encourage companies to make greater use of their videoconferencing infrastructure
www.installation-international.com
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