Scottish school spend steadies IWB market
Scottish Executive fnding helps to keep interactive whiteboard sales in schools bouyant
UK sales of interactive whiteboards (IWBs) received a welcome boost during Q1 due to £40m of funding from the Scottish Executive for schools to spend on educational resources.
As CRN reported in February, total sales of IWBs for 2006 fell to 83,000 units from 2005’s 99,000, with units this year expected to total 70,000.
Colin Messenger, senior consultant at market watcher Decision Tree Consulting (DTC), told CRN: “In total 21,000 IWBs were sold in the UK during Q1, of which 4,000 were a result of the Scottish Executive funding.”
VAR Misco, which has an office in Strathclyde, said it won tenders in five Scottish counties, while IWB vendor Promethean claimed it picked up 55 to 60 per cent of the spend.
According to DTC’s figures, IWB vendor Smart Technologies remained market leader with 59 per cent market share in Q1, with Promethean in second place with 28 per cent.
Paul Berry, director of UK business at Promethean, said: “We want to increase our market share by converting Smart schools over to Promethean. Our software is vendor independent so can work on Smart boards. In Q1 we sold our primary school software into about 480 schools.
“While it won’t be a bumper year for IWBs in education there will still be a lot of business to go after and my aim is to capture about 21,000 of the 70,000 IWBs DTC has predicted will be sold this year. To do this we’ll need to take some business from Smart.”
Mike Gammie, IT services development manager at Misco, said: “The corporate and public sector markets are a key focus for us this year.”