Watkins joins the Board to bolster AVM's growth
VAR signs former Cisco boss to steer acquisitions and hints at "one or two deals" in the coming year
Audio Visual Machines (AVM) has added former Cisco UK managing director Alan Watkins to its Board to drive the VAR’s acquisition plans.
Watkins has been appointed as a non-executive director to support and advise AVM, which last year acquired videoconferencing (VC) firm The Video Meeting Company (VMC) for an undisclosed fee (CRN, 17 October).
The VMC deal followed AVM’s acquisition of audiovisual VAR ITM (CRN, 9 May).
Edward Cook, chief executive of AVM, told CRN Watkins would help the firm with its acquisition plans.
“Watkins has come on board because his Cisco background is useful,” he said. “With IT and AV converging, his IT and communications knowledge is highly valuable. He will advise us on all aspects of growing the business.
“He also has a lot of corporate experience and knowledge of making acquisitions and integrating them into businesses. He will strengthen our Board and fuel our rapid growth plans.”
Cook said AVM will make several reasonably sized acquisitions and then move onto larger ones.
“We are actively looking at numerous acquisition opportunities,” he said. “In the next 12 months we hope to make one or two acquisitions.”
Cook added that AVM’s smaller acquisitions will be funded internally and the larger ones will be from equity backing, its existing backers or bank loans.
“Our acquisition trail is not just pure AV,” he said. “We are interested in IT companies as AV and IT converges. These could be firms covering networking infrastructure, video and audio bridging or IPTV.”
John Cooper, director at VC and AV reseller JKC, said: “AVM works very much on the AV side where IP is becoming more dominant. A lot of AV companies have seen the need to get skilled up on the data comms side.”