A lot of people know Vivitek as a projector manufacturer and it continues to innovate in that space. Recently, however, the company has stepped up with solutions serving the collaboration and BYOD space as well as digital signage.
CI editor Tom LeBlanc chatted with Peter Taylor, director of Demand Generation & Customer Support at Vivitek, prior to Integrated Systems Europe, where Vivitek was poised to make a splash in several product categories.
What should integrators know about NovoConnect, your BYOD and collaboration solution, and what does NovoPro add to the mix?
Because of our experiences in the K-12 marketplace with some of our interactive and short-throw projectors, we decided to [target] NovoConnect [at K-12] … As we rolled it out to school districts more and more, requests came in for more features and we decided to phase in feature sets with product releases.
About halfway through the development of NovoConnect we actually switched it into a corporate environment as well. We introduced the NovoPro in December. It incorporated all of the features of NovoConnect, but we added a few.
Hear more from Vivitek’s Peter Taylor in this video or continue reading below.
What do you hope attendees see and learn when they visit your booth at ISE 2016?
[ISE] will be the first real release of NovoDS, and that is digital signage. We’ve found that a lot of the digital signage products on the marketplace are very complex to use, so the average person trying to put content together needs training and it’s a little bit complex, so we really aimed it at simplicity to create [content] and for an administer to be able to monitor devices on the network … We’ll be releasing our first laser projector. It will be the brightest [at 3,000 lumens] in its class of laser projectors. It is fully featured. That will be one of the first of our laser projectors and there will be several that you’ll see over the next few months.
The projector and display businesses are very competitive. How is Vivitek differentiating itself to integrators and end users?
We can offer projection starting at 500 lumens all the way up to 12,000 lumens, as well as LED displays — indoors and outdoors — control room processors, control room cubes as well as flat-panel displays. We offer a lot of products, but what we have to do is make it more compelling for the integrators as well as the end users.
With our projectors we have a five-year warranty. We also back that up with a three-year advanced exchange program. It means that you can make margin. Then, how do you retain that margin? When you’re out there exchanging units, put one projector up, take one down, it all costs money and can add up to many points off the original margin. [So] our advanced exchange will pay shipping to the customer’s site and the return of the product. So we’ve really tried to help retain the margins for the integrator.
