Bird eyes corporate sales with AV start-up

Tag : av distributor

One of Steljes ’ directors is banking on massive growth of the corporateaudiovisual (AV) market as he prepares to begin work with a‘channel-friendly’ venture targeting the sector.
Steljes sales director Mark Bird will leave the interactivewhiteboard (IWB) distributor at the end of July, and claimedresellers, distributors and vendors will need help exploitingcorporate AV growth.
Steljes has seen non-education sales boom from 10 to 25 per cent
of overall business, Bird explained. “I have been selling IWBtechnology into corporate organisations for 13 years, but it isonly in the past six months that we have seen signs of significantpurchases,” Bird said.
“A telecoms firm recently purchased £500,000 ofcollaborative whiteboard technology, and you would never have seenthat magnitude of order until this year. My passion is to helporganisations that are targeting these markets take thoseopportunities and drive them further,” he explained.
Steljes’ group marketing director, Graham Wylie, denied thatBird’s departure is part of a cost-cutting drive. But headmitted Steljes was “looking at how its internal structurereflects the opportunities it sees in the market”.
Colin Messenger, analyst at AV market watcher Decision Tree Consulting , said: “We expect to see a lot of activity in the corporatespace. IWBs are now much more suited to corporates than the earlymodels.”
Messenger added that 70 per cent of UK classrooms now have IWBs,prompting resellers to hunt for alternative niches to sell into.