Along with our annual Top 50 Systems Integrators feature, we polled a selection of leading firms on industry topics.
SCN: What vertical markets and/or technologies exhibited the most growth for you in 2019?
Robby Turner, CTS, Executive Vice President Sales and Marketing, Data Projections
The enterprise and corporate markets continue to be strong in our region. The market continues to push for simple, easy-to-use, and easy-to-support solutions to help deliver its message. We’ve seen significant growth and interest in subscription services. Our AVaaS program changes how our customers consume the technologies and solutions we deliver by enabling them to provide their own internal customers with the latest technology and ongoing support in an opex subscription model—saving their capex funds for other projects/investments to help them grow their businesses.
Bill Chamberlin, Vice President of Global Sales, Verrex
Rather than a single vertical or application, Verrex has seen an increased emphasis on “choice” in workplaces, translating into multiple technologies and space/solution types to fit different workstyles and collaborative activity-based working. Our clients are taking their employees’ preferred workstyle (i.e., collaboration and focus) and building spaces and adopting technologies to accommodate.
Ken Scaturro, President and COO, Yorktel
We have seen the most growth in our managed services business, particularly with our alarming and monitoring capabilities. We have also experienced tremendous growth of our Microsoft practice driven by the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and the customer migrations to device as a service.
Rhonda Wingate, Vice President of Visual Collaboration Sales, Carousel Industries
We saw tremendous interest and growth in the all-in-one conferencing systems, such as Crestron Flex, Cisco Room Kits, and Poly Trio bundles. Customers are looking for solutions that are easy to use, install, and support, and that also integrate into their current UC environments, such as Microsoft Teams and Webex Teams, as well as with open architecture video cloud solutions such as Zoom or Pexip.
Dana Barron, CEO, HB Communications
Today it is difficult to identify individual technologies that grow independently of other technologies because they are all connected. For instance, our digital signage group may have high-level conversations regarding a global deployment and then, as a result of that, we close a large broadcast opportunity or a highly-customized AV solution. Technologies and services in our space make up what HB calls the “AV Ecosystem” that, in the end, addresses all the needs of our clients who want to communicate internally and externally at the highest level possible.
Jim Scalise, General Manager – Northern California, Avidex
To no one’s surprise, direct view LED has been a growth area for us. Yes, it is nothing new this year and we have been quoting them for a long time, but the prices have come down enough and the technology has improved enough for it to be a viable solution for many of our customers. It is definitely meeting a need for many of our customers when traditional solutions like large-screen displays are not big enough, projection is not bright enough, or either of those does not provide a “wow” factor. We see dvLED to continue to be a growth area for us.
Jeff Irvin, Principal, Spinitar
While government and education markets remain strong, we saw a spike in enterprise/corporate business—with requests to support them globally, which we are doing by leveraging our PSNI Global Partners.
