businessinfomag.uk
magazine
26
James Goulding talks to Nigel Steljes about his
new company and interactive flat panel displays
Avocor is a new name to reckon
with in the AV industry. A specialist
manufacturer of interactive touch
screens for the education and
corporate sectors, the company is the
latest venture of Nigel Steljes who
set up and ran AV distributor Steljes
for 28 years.
Steljes went into administration
in May after falling out with SMART
Technologies, which accounted for 60-
70% of the distributor’s turnover.
Avocor was officially launched
on June 14, but its interactive touch
screens – the world’s first to run on the
Windows 10 operating system – were
originally unveiled at January’s BETT
show under the Vividtouch brand. The
65, 75 and 84in flat panels cost around
£3,000 to £5,000 and are sold through a
network of value-added resellers.
On June 17, Avocor announced
an agreement with Nureva Inc. to
distribute its Span ideation and
classroom collaboration systems.
James Goulding spoke to Avocor
managing director Nigel Steljes about
the new company, its products and its
plans for the future.
Business Info:
What does Avocor
manufacture and where?
Nigel Steljes:
We build an interactive
panel, currently branded Vividtouch
but it will transfer across to the Avocor
name.We have designed this product
very, very carefully to give teachers
exactly what they want at the front
of the class. Most manufacturers
say the same, but this product has
significant differences relating to touch,
functionality, connectability. All of those
things are really key. And the operating
system is Windows 10, which is pretty
much ubiquitous.
We use an OEM manufacturer called
Agile Displays based in Taiwan. They
are a quality manufacturer. They make
displays for a number of high profile
vendors and have been doing so for a
long time. The general view is that they
make a very high quality product.We are
on our third generation of product built
by them, and in our experience product
reliability is very good.
BI:
TheWindows 10 Vividtouch VTF
series was unveiled at the BETT
education show. Are you also targeting
corporate customers?
Steljes:
This panel was designed with an
education user in mind. So, on the front
it has a freeze frame function, which
enables a teacher to freeze an image
on the screen so that pupils can refer to
it while they are doing coursework or
while the teacher is loading something
else on their computer. Then, as soon
as they want to go live again, they
can bring it back. It also has a blank
screen feature, so if the teacher wants
to be the focus of attention they can
press a button and the screen will go
blank. These things were designed for
education. But the amazing thing is we
Q&A
have had a phenomenal response from
the enterprise market. One major bank
is about to deploy nearly 250 panels in
meeting rooms around the globe. The
tick box for them was theWindows 10
platform. All their people haveWindows
10 loaded on their notebooks, so it offers
a completely familiar experience; there is
no bespoke software to learn.
BI:
Is there much demand for
interactive displays in the corporate
market?
Steljes:
My track record has always
been bringing in new technologies. I
launched LCD panels in the ‘80s – they
sat on overhead projectors and gave very
simplistic data projection. That morphed
into the self-contained LCD projector,
and I was the largest distributors of those
– the largest in the world for a period
in the ‘90s. Then, we launched plasma
televsions at £12,000 a pop. The point
is that we have always spotted the next
thing. In education sales of interactive
flat panels (IFPs) are very robust, but
it is a replacement market – IFPs are
going in and interactive whiteboards are
being taken out. The excitement and
the potential, especially when you build
something on theWindows 10 platform,
is in the enterprise market.
When you try to sell something that
operates on a bespoke platform, that
requires a training programme and is
unintuitive, it’s very difficult to get buy-
in from organisations. But we are offering
a tool that is familiar and simple to use.
The consultants who negotiated the deal
with the bank sat in a room with three
of its stakeholders – one from HR, one
from IT and one from Facilities. HR said:
‘We have no issues with training in HR,
because it’s aWindows platform.’ IT said:
‘It’s aWindows 10 front end, so there
are no issues with integration with our
systems.’ And Facilities said: ‘It’s a big
telly on the wall, we’ve got no problem
with that’. People have never had that
simplicity before; AV was always a bit
quirky.
Nigel Steljes,
Managing Director,
Avocor
Interview
...continued
We have
designed this
product very,
very carefully
to give teachers
exactly what
they want
