Wick Hill and Panasonic square up to video alpha males

As former Computerlinks man Kevan Reade joins as UK sales boss, distributor gears up for big videoconferencing push

Wick Hill is looking to make a big splash in the video arena and claims vendor partner Panasonic's technology is just one-seventeenth of the cost of bigger rivals.

The Woking-based VAD is selling the vendor's technology through its newly formed hosting and convergence arm. It stocks the Panansonic KX-VC300 and KX-VC600 HD videoconferencing systems. Based on scalable video coding (SVC) technology,
Wick Hill chairman Ian Kilpatrick claimed the cost was a fraction of other manufacturers' multiview video coding (MVC)-based systems.

"MVC will cost $168,000 (£108,000), according to IDC, while the point cost for SVC is $9,700. We have the ability to do mid-sized videoconferencing with HD," he added.

"The big players – Cisco, Polycom and guys like that – they sell big-ticket systems. The cost of entry is huge. You need a big whack of kit, a whack of accreditations, a whack of training and there is a comparatively small number of resellers doing it."

The new hosting and convergence division, which also includes recently added partner Fiberlink, will be overseen by comms and network-specialised sales manager Siobhan Gibbs. The team has begun life with four focused sales heads, supported by three technical staff and two account managers.

Gibbs will report into recently recruited UK sales boss Kevan Reade, who has previously worked for Fusion Distribution and Computerlinks Asia.

Kilpatrick claimed that resellers could easily demonstrate the return on investment on Panasonic's videoconferencing kit.

"If I look at sending somebody up north to stay overnight, with petrol and hotel costs, you are looking at the thin end of £300-400. It doesn't take very many of those to make back $9,000," he explained. "[SVC] is going to tear out a huge percentage of a multi-billion dollar market."