Bird eyes corporate sales with AV start-up

One of Steljes’ directors is banking on massive growth of the corporate audiovisual (AV) market as he prepares to begin work with a ‘channel-friendly’ venture targeting the sector.

Steljes sales director Mark Bird will leave the interactive whiteboard (IWB) distributor at the end of July, and claimed resellers, distributors and vendors will need help exploiting corporate AV growth.

Steljes has seen non-education sales boom from 10 to 25 per cent
of overall business, Bird explained. “I have been selling IWB technology into corporate organisations for 13 years, but it is only in the past six months that we have seen signs of significant purchases,” Bird said.

“A telecoms firm recently purchased £500,000 of collaborative whiteboard technology, and you would never have seen that magnitude of order until this year. My passion is to help organisations that are targeting these markets take those opportunities and drive them further,” he explained.

Steljes’ group marketing director, Graham Wylie, denied that Bird’s departure is part of a cost-cutting drive. But he admitted Steljes was “looking at how its internal structure reflects the opportunities it sees in the market”.

Colin Messenger, analyst at AV market watcher Decision Tree Consulting, said: “We expect to see a lot of activity in the corporate space. IWBs are now much more suited to corporates than the early models.”

Messenger added that 70 per cent of UK classrooms now have IWBs, prompting resellers to hunt for alternative niches to sell into.