Exertis’ Pro AV business is making unified comms and collaboration its “number one” focus area, according to its’ Head of AV Solutions, Greg Bennett.
Exertis united its AV and UC services together under the Pro AV umbrella around 18 months ago. Bennett said that the pandemic proved this to be a savvy decision as the unit was bolstered by the demand for its collaboration offerings, while demands for its AV products tailed off due to reduced demand in key verticals, such as events and hospitality.
However, Bennett emphasised that as the recovery from the pandemic continues, there is huge potential for cross-selling between traditional AV and UC customers.
“I don’t think we’re going to go back to the tradition of AV being the lead offering because the AV market has changed so much,” he explained.
“I’ve talked to a lot of resellers and integrators in that AV channel who have changed as well; traditionally they’d have walked past all of those collaborative opportunities to get to the big auditorium or the big install or the big boardroom at the end. Now, they’re focusing on their collaborative solutions away from that one big project in favour of these multiple huge rollouts of lots of collaborative spaces.
“I can only see us continuing to go from strength to strength with collaboration being our number one focus area.”
Exertis Pro AV has certainly made this focus clear with recent appointments to its Unified Communications and Collaboration (UC&C) team, including Andy Pollard and Haifa Jinadu as Pre-Sales Architects, Jon Grundy as its UC&C Business Development Manager and Patrick Young as Microsoft Teams Specialist.
Bennett – who joined Exertis three years ago – said that the appointments are a culmination of his role in transforming the distie from a “broadline box shifter” to a solutions partner.
“I’ve worked tirelessly to make sure that we have the right propositions that are relevant to the marketplace and talk the same language as our customers,” he stated.
“Having these new people has really propelled us into that solution and technical selling space, which really matches a lot of the expertise that is in the channel in those integration partners, especially tier-one integrators. They can now rely on these resources to help them win business, to technically design and to scope out projects, particularly around Poly and Microsoft Teams.”
The addition of Young as a dedicated Teams specialist is partly a result of the “explosion” in collaborative working over the past year, Bennett said. But it is also part of the opportunity that Exertis sees around Teams.
“I‘ve looked at lots of the collaboration platforms which we work with, but I decided to align ourselves with Microsoft because of the opportunity but also because our business models are similar,” he explained.
“We already have a Microsoft practice within our IT business unit and it made perfect sense as an AV and UC&C business unit to have a Microsoft alliance.”
Bennett said that he has been developing Exertis’s Teams proposition to be the most comprehensive and extensive of any UK distributor and Young’s addition to the group “completes this jigsaw”.
“We are a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider partner, we have a services practice that offers professional and managed services around Microsoft and have also built a training platform for driving adoption of Microsoft Teams with the certified devices that we have to sell,” he elaborated.
“We’ve got the certified hardware, we’ve got the software, we can sell the licencing, we’ve got the services wrapped to go with it. With Patrick as our resident expert, he complements what we already had and gives us that spearhead into taking it to the market.”
