Top 14 Corporate Market Integrators

These innovative, market-leading firms share dos and don’ts when approaching this largest integration vertical.

“[Our advantage is that we offer clients] advanced collaborative integration design … In 2014, the dynamic integration of real-time video applications, streaming, and contextual aware environments all presented inside a simple, yet powerful user interface, has led CIOs to leverage the skill of TI’s software and hardware engineering teams.

“This powerful integration of multiple content control engines create a huge advantage and a tremendous increase in the user adoption of collaborative technology across the business, exponentially increasing ROI.” —Chris Johnson, CTO Technical Innovation

“[Advanced AV succeeds by] being able to position ourselves within client organizations as a part of their technology team to ongoing projects with system integration, protect their investment with services as well as help plan design and strategize future direction of technology implementation.” —John Green, VP of Sales and Marketing, Advanced AV

“Ford Audio-Visual has perfected its ability to execute the engineering, project management and installation of AV systems for large corporate customers. New construction projects where hundreds of AV meeting spaces are being installed on a strict schedule of milestones where the ‘move in’ date cannot be delayed are very difficult job sites and require a high level of management, planning and organization. Ford has developed methods that increase our efficiency and quality while being able to meet the demanding installation schedules.”—Jim Ford, Ford Audio-Video

Related: CI Profile of Industry Leader IMS Technology Services

“The corporate marketplace has been very active especially over the past three years evolving their technology infrastructure. The importance of collaboration is evident as corporations see the significant return on investment by leveraging the human capital within the enterprise. The opportunity to increase productivity and attract and retain key resources by having highly available AV solutions in place has fueled the growth in this and other markets.

“HB has an advantage of being in the AV business for almost 70 years and in that time we have developed a deep knowledge in every part of the AV ecosystem including; tradition AV, unified communications, broadcast, streaming media, digital signage, managed services, and live event production. Therefore we can partner with any organization at any level because all entities, no matter what size or shape, have the need to collaborate both internally and externally as well as create and share content.” —Dana Barron, CEO, HB Communications

On Failure:

“Pedaling product, just talking about the product, or the bits and the bytes. I think clients today need to have a solution, not necessarily the pieces that go into it. They need to under- stand from a higher level the solution that’s going to produce that increased efficiency and productivity. So, I think the red flag is those that are trying to sell a flat panel or trying to sell a control system.” —Derek Paquin, Principal, Sensory Technologies

“As physical security and audio visual solutions drive toward software centric-solutions and cloud-based technologies, we are seeing the customer’s IT teams taking larger roles in vetting the technology solutions and integrator. If an integration firm cannot speak with the customer’s IT team at a high level, they will not be successful working with a corporate customer. Not only engineers and technicians need to be trained on IT, but rather all levels of the organization need to be IT centric, including sales.

“Since the outside sales rep is the first person to usually meet a new prospect it is surely important for them to have strong IT skills. They need to ‘talk the talk and walk the walk.’ Not having IT knowledge or skills at the table will surely be a red flag.” —Rob Simopoulos, President, Advance Technology

“Avoid bad paying customers. Bad paying customers do nothing but drag you down, and it prevents you from delivering a quality product and service. Customers that don’t pay deposits, customers that don’t agree to progress payments, customers that hold an exorbitant amount of retainage — I would classify that as anything over 5 percent.

“Stay away from customers that are looking for low bid, because low bid is low margin, and low margin is no way to run your business. If you’re proud and believe in your quality, then you charge for it. If we’re low bid then we made a mistake.” —Thomas Berry Jr., President & CEO, Verrex

“The biggest red flag today, I believe, are organizations that continue to sell technology rather than selling what the technology accomplishes for their partner. If you don’t fully understand what the client’s goals and objectives are you are going to become less relevant.” —Dana Barron, CEO, HB Communications

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