INTERVIEW : VIVITEK
Filling the gaps in B2B AV
While most of the industry has clamoured for collaboration-specific devices, Vivitek is looking at the whole solution.
One of the key themes of modern working practice is to make the office worth coming into. That may seem a questionable idea to those who have been working 9-to-5 for a lot of their lives but trends like the great resignation have put the power in the people’s hands when it comes to working conditions. Of course, the benefit of making the office an attractive place to work in is twofold. One is employee satisfaction, and the second is to make a good impression on the new customers, clients and partners who arrive at HQ. It may sound like a frivolous thing to focus on, but we all know how these things make a big difference in the professional decisions we make. If you turn up at a small, poorly-lit office, with a half-dead pot plant in the corner, and tables littered with random documents or year-old magazines, it’s only natural to have second thoughts. Those first impressions also apply to virtual meetings, where lateness and poor connectivity can cause untold frustration. As a result, Vivitek General Manager EMEA Holger Graeff said that, as the collaboration market moves away from HDMI, ease of use is paramount to new solutions. “When we started the journey with flat panels, we already had a device called NovoConnect, which was a wireless
transmission device. It did the job, but it was not user-friendly at the time. “We realised how important that ease of use piece is as we think about moving away from the HDMI cable to wireless communication with the display. “That started everything for us. We decided to take a one-year pause so our engineers could travel around the world to understand what the customer wants whether that’s a corporate customer, teacher or someone else. “So I would say that since 2018, especially when we then launched our flat panels with built-in wireless collaboration, we realised how significant it is to be able to easily connect to our solutions.” Moving with the Times The integration of connectivity to displays is something that Graeff has seen throughout his career. Starting in the late 80s for Sharp Electronics, he soon found a home in the AV industry, where he focussed on sales and developing businesses throughout EMEA before landing at Vivitek in the summer of 2010. “I’ve been in the industry since 1989. I spent 10 years with Sharp responsible for European business, then I joined a Norwegian company called ASK Proxima, which was then merged with InFocus. After that, I spent a couple of years in the high-end home cinema category with Runco before I joined Vivitek. “I’ve been hired to take care of the business in Europe, Middle East and Africa and, at the time, Vivitek was a new brand in the AV market but nobody knew that Delta Electronics, which is a very large electronics company, is behind it. “For the first three years, we invited customers to our factories in Wujiang, which is close to Shanghai, which opened the eyes of many of our customers because the feedback we received was that Delta is an unknown giant.”
Holger Graeff General Manager EMEA
vivitek.eu
When we started the journey with flat panels, we already had a device called NovoConnect, which was a wireless transmission device. It did the job...
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