44 INTERVIEW // FVC / BARCO
Powering through
Reseller ME sat with the charismatic duo Ramzi Itani, Vice President – MEA, Barco and K.S. Parag, Managing Director, FVC, to find out more about Barco’s new ClickShare conference and how important a role FVC plays in Barco’s overall market strategy as a distributor.
CAN YOU TELL US MORE ABOUT THE CLICKSHARE CONFERENCING? HOW IS BARCO’S NEW CLICKSHARE CONFERENCE SOLUTION REVOLUTIONISING MEETINGS AND WIRELESS CONFERENCING? Ramzi: ClickShare conference came as an outcome of listening to our customers, understanding their needs and expectations, tackling their challenges and most importantly, aiming towards the future. Over the past few years, we’ve realised that ‘Bring Your Own Device’ has changed a lot in the way IT operates, and today, particularly in the UAE and Saudi alone, we are seeing a huge explosion in meeting rooms technology. We launched the original ClickShare seven years ago, and constantly innovated to stay ahead and maintain our market leading position in the market. We wanted to come up with a product that is both technology agnostic and extremely easy to integrate at the same time. The new ClickShare Conference range consists of three different models – the entry level CX-20 for small meeting rooms and with limited features, the CX-30 for standard meeting rooms and interactive features such as whiteboarding, annotations and collaboration, and lastly the highend CX-50 for large meeting rooms and premium AV collaboration experience with superior audio and video quality.
Parag: Barco was the first to come up with ClickShare conference in the industry, and they did a brilliant job not just revolutionising the conference space, but also making it seamless, enabling users to kick-start a meeting. Every customer is looking to integrate video as part of their meeting in their digital transformation journey today. That is exactly what Barco did to transform the company’s expedience of bringing complete collaboration, including integrated video and others features combined. WHAT IS THE STATE OF THE VISUALISATION AND COLLABORATION SOLUTIONS MARKET IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA (MEA) AT THE MOMENT? R: The UAE and Saudi are two large markets in the region with several upcoming projects including the EXPO 2020, Museum of the Future and Vision 2030 to name a few. Such projects have propelled the visualisation and collaboration solutions market and bolstered the opportunities for projection, LED and LCD technologies in the region. Barco has three divisions – enterprise, entertainment and healthcare. We are experiencing an increased demand in the healthcare sector for visual collaborative technologies and services. Hospitals today are looking to conduct effective operations and
www.tahawultech.com // Reseller Middle East // APRIL 2020
deliver world-class healthcare services. For this purpose, the video and images must be of highest possible quality for the medical heads and their staff to make reliable medical decisions, especially with the rise of minimal invasive surgery. Barco has had the honor of being a part of this growth in the UAE contributing with its suite of world-class visualisation and laser projection solutions. THE WORKPLACE IS UNDERGOING A FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION. CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT YOUR GO-TO MARKET STRATEGY FOR THESE SOLUTIONS? R: Our strategy at Barco is tailored to suit every market need. We used to operate with very few partners, system integrators and distributors and today, through distributors like FVC, we are
OUR STRONG REGIONAL PRESENCE COUPLED WITH OUR WIDE CUSTOMER BASE WILL FURTHER BOOST BARCO’S PRODUCT REACH AND DRIVER CUSTOMERS’ DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION INITIATIVES.” – K.S. PARAG, FVC
