In one fell-swoop America’s largest professional audio visual solution provider AVI-SPL expanded internationally.
The company based in Tampa Bay, Fla., acquired gained four new locations, three of which will be in Canada and the fourth in London, U.K. AVI-SPL acquired Duocom-Duologik, a solution provider with expertise in both IT and AV run by CDN Women in the IT channel honoree Zoreena Abas.
Abas has been retained by AVI-SPL and will be task to run the Canadian operation for the company.
Related Story: Find out more about Zoreena Abas and the other top women executives honoured at the CDN Women in the Channel event.
John Zettel, CEO of AVI-SPL, said the company has aggressively moved into the video teleconferencing market and has built onto its integration and services portfolio and described the Duocom-Duologik acquisition as an opportunistic one that fit into the company’s overall expansion plans.
“We realized as a company that customers wanted a connected solution and at the same time we began catering more to an enterprise customer. We wanted to services them and needed a physical presence,” Zettel said.
Going forward the Duocom brand will no longer be used in favour of AVI-SPL. Zettel added that he was impressed by Duocom’s many relationships in the Canadian market and wants to compliment that with his company’s infrastructure and access to services. He believes this will provide the Canadian operation with more opportunities and the employees will get more training. Zettel did acknowledge that the marriage between IT and AV is still rocky at best.
For example, Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg has changed the margin potential in the marketplace. “We are still taking about a collaborative solution in a common meeting space. We own the meeting room and we do thousands of integration projects each year for meeting rooms. The IT guys have the server room, but it’s different in video with data but I believe our specialty does set us apart,” Zettel said.
AVI-SPL has more than 1,600 employees now with this acquisition. The company has vendor partnerships with Polycom, Cisco, Panasonic, NEC, and Samsung.
The new UK and Canada offices are staffed with solution architects, engineers, project managers, and installation and service technicians. AVI-SPL’s VNOC Symphony software platform and Customer Care International Help Desk will also be a part of the UK operations.
AVI-SPL’s new operations in the UK and Canada will offer complete video communications solutions from design and integration to ongoing support.
This includes solutions from video collaboration and conferencing support, to digital media and signage, advanced 3D visualization, advanced audio engineering, and command and control centres.