Extracted from Installation - ISE 2018 Show Review - published 08.03.18
A new name in collaboration was born at ISE 2018 – Kinly, formed from the merger of VisionsConnected and Viju. On the last morning of the show, Paddy Baker spoke to Kinly executives to find out about the new company’s approach to the market.
ISE 2018 saw the launch of one of the world’s largest systems integration companies: Kinly – formed from the merger of VisionsConnected and Viju. This follows the acquisition of both companies by an investor last September.
Viju and VisionsConnected were both leading players in video communications, and so it’s not surprising that Kinly – whose company slogan is ‘Working together. Everywhere’ – is entirely devoted to collaboration projects.
(L-R Raymond Alves, chief solutions officer, Magnus Lervag, collaboration consultant, Knut Bentzen, chief marketing officer)
Chief solutions officer Raymond Alves – previously CEO of VisionsConnected – observes that, over the past 10 years, customer demands have changed. “There is a lot of collaboration within an organisation and between organisations and that collaboration does not always work in a perfect manner. So, we have been dealing with a lot of technological fixes to make meetings run. And while doing that, we worked with a lot of partners – but at the end the customer was asking, ‘Can you take overall responsibility for all those meetings? I want to have one contact and one contract. What can you do?’ Now it’s getting interesting.
“We found an investor and started to believe that this thing could work – meaning taking over all responsibility of meetings. Then basically we picked up the phone to Viju and said, we have something new, how about joining this party together? And if we do that, we need to elaborate on a new story – because technology is not the thing any more, the thing is how we make meetings run in an effective way.”
According to Alves, there is a large opportunity for Kinly because of the fragmented nature of the integration market, particularly when it comes to serving multinational companies.
We’re talking about how teams should work efficiently together within the organisation and between their customers and partners. If all those different AV contractors make their own technology decisions about how it should work together – it’s a mess.
“There is a long way to go, but if we have these international capabilities and the ambition to standardise in such a way that the technology works smoothly together, then we’re giving ourselves a good chance that we can win those contracts on a global level in the next contracting round. So, let’s have this conversation next year, and I promise you, we will have some new announcements to make.”
Understanding users
One of the refreshing things talking to the Kinly team is that they clearly understand that not all meetings are the same, and not all collaboration is the same. So rather than looking to impose a one-size-fits-all solution, they seek to understand the users and their work before talking about technology.
Bentzen talks about an ‘activity-based workspace’: “It’s not a standard meeting room where you go in and fit your work process into the room. It’s kind of the opposite: different spaces and places that are optimised for a type of activity. We have several examples of solutions that don’t look like a standard meeting room, but are optimised for a specific purpose.”
There’s a great sense of optimism and confidence coming from my interviewees, along with broad smiles that one doesn’t often see on the last morning of a major trade show. I look forward to seeing Alves’ prediction of major contract wins coming true.
To read the article in full, check out Installation March 2018 Digital Edition
