News Analysis


Exertis balances its global portfolio with acquisitions


Last year was significant for Exertis for expansion into North America, with both Jam and Stampede added to parent company DCC’s port- folio. This year, northern Europe has risen to prominence, with the announcement of full year results coinciding with news of the acquisi- tion of COMM-TEC GmbH in Germany and Amacom in the Netherlands.


DCC Technology, better known in AV circles as Exertis, has announced the acquisition of COMM-TEC GmbH, as part of DCC’s ambitions to offer a global distribution platform to its vendor partners. Headquar- tered east of Stuttgart, COMM- TEC generated over €90 mil- lion revenue in its last financial year. It employs over 150 staff across Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Spain and with sales operations in East- ern Europe. Gerry


O’Keeffe, Exertis In-


ternational Managing Director says of the acquisition: “Pro Audio-Visual is a strategic pri- ority for Exertis, growing from an already strong position in


ference and control; and racks and mounts. The company has relationships with a wide range of vendors including Barco, Brightsign, Chief, Gefen, Mid- dle Atlantic, Newline and QSC. COMM-TEC’s experienced management team will remain after the completion of the acquisition reporting to Eric Bousquet, Managing Director, Exertis commercial Western Europe.


Rainer Sprinzl, COMM-TEC, Managing Director, said: “This is a great opportunity for our business and our employees to be part of an organisation that has clearly demonstrated its desire to grow both organically and through acquisition. Equal-


ability to solutions.


Amacom is located in Den Bosch,


in the south of the


Netherlands, the company em- ploys around eighty staff with revenues of €160 million in the last financial year. Gerry O’Keeffe explains: “Amacom provides us with the opportu- nity to expand our Consumer Electronics business in Conti- nental Europe. There is great synergy between our two com- panies in the consumer market which we can leverage to the benefit of our vendors, who increasingly want to work with fewer partners across Europe. Amacom is well respected for its sophisticated distribution


provide end-to-end


Plantronics plus Polycom equals, what?


It is now almost exactly a year since Plantronics announced that it had completed the acquisition of Polycom. At the time, Joe Burton, Plan- tronics’ President and Chief Executive Officer said that “Plantronics now offers an unparalleled portfolio of integrated, intelligent solutions that spans headsets, software, desk phones, audio and video confer- encing, and cloud services.” Plantronics was said to be “focused on voice, video, content, and cloud solutions for every place that technol- ogy touches people as they work, share, collaborate, and play.” In this AV News interview, Poly’s Paul Clark, Senior Vice President and EMEA Managing Director at Poly, reviews progress and future prospects for the merged entity


Paul Clark: Let’s start with a little bit about the company. I’m not sure how much time you have spent on Plantronics prior to the merger – the her- itage of the company is head- sets. Most people, if they think of headsets think of Plantron- ics, so we are the biggest in that space - the biggest in the market.


Polycom obviously had a his- tory in video and video con- ferencing and it was about a year ago that we made the an- nouncement about the acquisi- tion. In July last year we closed the acquisition and bought the two companies together. Our reasoning was that the markets were converging; the companies were pretty similar, although they were becoming different parts of the same mar- ket. UC&C is driving almost all the transitions from personal communications to group com- munications, and voice centric to video centric.


AV News: How did you see the benefits of the merger?


Exertis profiles many of its vendor partners at the recent Exertis Plug-in event at Silverstone.


the UK and Ireland, Nordics and France, along with recent market leading acquisitions in North America; COMM-TEC is a key investment in our continu- ing growth story.


COMM-TEC


provides Exertis’ customers and vendors with a first-class European platform and togeth- er with Exertis’ Supply Chain Solutions


business in gives us


global reach in this important and growing category.” “COMM-TEC is a specialist providing value-added Pro


AV solutions with an emphasis on pre and post sales technical support for its customers. It has an excellent reputation in the markets in which it oper- ates.


In addition to increasing our presence in Continental Europe, this acquisition pro- vides


great synergy opportu-


nities with our Exertis Pro AV Solutions divisions in other countries. The acquisition will provide our customers with in- creased range of products and services and aligns Exertis with our vendor partners who are increasingly looking for compa- nies that can support them in realising their international Pro AV and IT ambitions.”


COMM-TEC provides a range of Pro AV solutions that encom- pass presentation hardware; digital signage and media solu- tions; signal management, con-


P8 AV News June 2019


ly, it has great benefits for our customers and vendors with the potential to extend our product portfolio and service offerings to meet the increasingly collab- orative requirements of end-us- ers in today’s workplace.” Wolfgang Lenz, COMM- founder,


TEC said: “During


more than three decades, we have built a great business at COMM-TEC which is testament to all the team’s hard work and dedication. This next step in our journey presents an excel- lent opportunity to develop our business further and take ad- vantage of the synergies avail- able in being part of the Exertis group.” With Germany, and the DACH region generally, now assuming the pre-eminence once afforded to the UK in its heyday, establishing a strong footprint here is important for DCC Technology. But it is by no means the only centre for growth in ProAV applications. The Netherlands is a leading centre for AR and VR and also a growing market for consumer electronics and small domestic appliances. DCC’s second ac- quisition of Amacom addresses this sector – a real strength for Exertis, as evidenced by the va- riety of vendors on show at the recent Plug-in event, and in- strumental in the distributor’s


and service capabilities, serv- ing the Benelux market with an impressive, online portal that is widely used by retailers, and has strong relationships with key vendors.” Amacom’s most important vendors include: Clearplex, LG, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung and Sony. In the established DCC acquisition model, Ama- com’s management team will remain in place after the com- pletion of the acquisition with the current CEO, Dick Engels, reporting into O’Keeffe. “With the additional resource and financial strength of DCC, we will continue the strong growth of our business in the Netherlands and beyond, and provide new opportunities for the channel and, most impor- tantly, our employees under the Exertis brand. This is a signifi- cant step for Amacom that will enable us to be part of a highly successful operation which is rapidly expanding its presence across the globe,” said Engels


Paul Clark: The two heritages of the companies meant that, while we started in different places, there was a significant overlap between the two. That wasn’t our doing - that was the market, and the customer, and what they were looking for. In- dividuals are making individual choices - right through to whole organisations who are making decisions about how they want to collaborate.


Having merged, the real idea was to be the end point ven- dor of choice for unified com- munications and collabora- tion space. We have a single brand which we announced in March this year. That’s only one step in the integration of two pretty strong business- es. Plantronics started in the early 1960s, Polycom was in the 1990s. They’re not so far apart geographically and we’ve known each other for years. In fact we’ve been present in the market together for a number of years doing campaigns and things like that.


AV News: How did you ar- rive at the brand Poly?


Paul Clark: Coming togeth- er the two companies is about putting forward a proposition, and in the end branding is about simplifying what people think of one name. We chose the name Poly as obviously we had the heritage and brand equity in Plantronics as we


Paul Clark, Senior Vice President, EMEA Managing Director at Poly.


did equity with Polycom, but the name Poly isn’t because of Polycom. The name Poly is actually because of the Greek ’many’ or the ‘power of many’. We thought that was a good clarion call to what we were about, so it’s about bringing many, to the many, in whatever guise that communication and collaboration takes place. So having launched that brand in the logo, that also harks back to the heritage of the company – in one way, you’ll see a pro- peller which is part of Plantron- ics and its heritage with plane electronics, and with Polycom you can see the lineage in star form to audio conferencing.


AV News: So how would you define the market for Poly?


Paul Clark: As one company, we have broad coverage, from an individual collaborating with others on the phone (using pure audio) to an individual’s desk; an individual in a room collab- orating on speaker phones; all the way through to group col- laboration using video. Video is quite important on the overall story because typically, people democratise collaboration, so you chose what’s best for you. There are times when audio is more than enough, but there are times when audio isn’t enough and video becomes important. This includes times when nuances are important, and times when sharing is important, because there is a significant portion of communi- cation that interaction between individuals is body language. If we just rely on voices and we don’t see each other the split in communication is about 13% to the words that we say, and 87% is the tone of voice


– pause, power, intonation and so on for emphasis or whatever. In face-to-face communication, you have a whole new dynamic About 55% of the communica- tion that occurs in collaboration is nuances and body language, so video becomes important in that it enables the dispersal of body language. There are other ratios: 13% is influenced by the tone and the intonation, so video becomes really important, so for us as a company we are now able to offer a breadth of portfolio but also, over time, bringing together


the user experience


and intuitive interface, When I use a Poly solution and I press a certain button I know what happens. If you’ve ever driv- en Volkswagen cars, it doesn’t matter if you get into a Golf or Passat, the buttons pretty much all follow what Volkswa- gen does.


AV News: So the objective, then, is to bring this degree of familiarity to the product portfolios of both compa- nies?


Paul Clark: That’s what we will be doing but we’ll be go- ing one stage. What’s critical for the end point is an assur- ance of


interoperability. This


means that if you pick up your Poly headset, turn it on and press the button it works with your phone or it works with the app on your phone. You don’t need to worry about how it does it, the wizardry of us, it just needs to work. We don’t know what you’re going to use for, we don’t know what app you’re go- ing to use,and to be honest it shouldn’t really matter.


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