Midwich’s unified comms and collaboration tools are firmly at the heart of its growth strategy, according to its Head of Technology, Jenny Hicks.
The distributor has traditionally focused on AV, but in its most recent fiscal results it highlighted its UC capabilities as it successfully navigated a challenging year.
Hicks told UC Today that though Midwich jumped on the UC trend at a good time, it was already moving in that direction because of the increasing integration of unified comms with AV products.
“UC is front and centre of our growth strategy, to be honest,” she said.
“We’ve always had a toe in the water when it comes to UC. If you look back at the history of video conferencing, it really was a predominantly AV-handled technology before the shift over to the cloud…and in that shift and through consolidation in the market, that all paved the way for UC to be considered more of an IT and telecoms tech - away from AV.
“The shift to cloud-based solutions was strong and we were witnessing this takeover. So we said ‘that's a portion of the business that we can't guarantee will stick around for us so we need to revise because it's no longer just VC, it is now also UC and we have to make sure that we’re still relevant in meeting spaces of all sizes’. A lot of our partners got us into this space early and then it was very easy for us to see that this was what we were missing.”
The integration of UC and AV maximises the opportunity for Midwich in the corporate, public and education spheres, Hicks said, adding that refresh opportunities will give the distie’s presence in these sectors a boost.
“In three to five years’ time, tech evolution will give us a refresh opportunity which is great because kits are getting better and lasting longer…the software is dictating the need for that hardware to keep changing and evolving which is great,” she explained.
“UC has massively merged with audio visual; we’re maximising our opportunity into the corporate space, the public sector and opportunity into education because they need to be able to talk to people externally as well.
“I don't see this going away, we've stepped firmly into this space and we mean to stay here.”
