Executive Interview with Martijn Blokland, Sales Director of Talk & Vision

Talk & Vision was founded in 1998 and now employs 50 people at offices across Europe. The company's headquarters are in Linschoten in The Netherlands.

Martijn Blokland joined Talk & Vision as Sales Director on 1 January 2006. He is responsible for the sales strategy and for the sales offices in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. Prior to joining Talk & Vision, Martijn was Global Account Director for the Netherlands at TANDBERG. Martijn has a Bachelor’s degree in Business and Economics from the Rotterdam School of Management. We interviewed Martijn on 10 September 2009.

Editor: When did KPN acquire control of Talk and Vision and what role does it play for KPN.

Martijn: KPN purchased a 51% majority stake in Talk &Vision on 1 July 2009. KPN will increase its stake to 100% in 2012. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed. But we can talk about the reasons behind this move.

KPN has its own videoconferencing operation. So too does Getronics, the IT and networking specialist with a global reach which KPN acquired in 2006. Talk & Vision, KPN and Getronics all posted fast sales growth in this field of videoconferencing in 2008. So it is a fast growing market. KPN was looking for substantial expansion in videoconferencing and felt it was best to buy an established player.

Talk and Vision was the largest videoconferencing specialist in the Netherlands with revenues of Euros 13 million in 2008 and some valuable large corporate customers, in particular in The Netherlands and United Kingdom. So this was a quick way for KPN to grow its videoconferencing competence and revenues. It was good for Talk and Vision too because to grow fast we needed extra   capital and KPN can supply us with that. Next to that KPN / Getronics have a massive salesforce of 750+ people who will sell videoconferencing to their customers in the future.

Talk & Vision's operations became part of Getronics Information & Communication Solutions. This fits in well with the “New Way of Working”, a concept that both KPN and Getronics offer their customers. The New Way of Working is also a major pillar of the sustainability policy pursued by both KPN and Getronics and their customers.

Editor: How do you convince people there is a new way of working?

Martijn: It is difficult to persuade people to change their habit of jumping on a plane to have a face-to-face meeting. But time and events are on our side. Young managers have grown up using MSN and Skype and take easily to using video technology. And the older generation doesn’t like the increasing hassle of plane travel any more. Furthermore in The Netherlands and Belgium we have some of the densest road traffic in the world.

Editor: What have been the major obstacles to the adoption of VC and TP in the Benelux countries?

Martijn: There is a reluctance to change the traditional way of meeting face-to-face. This is surprising given the enormous road traffic congestion we have. Just for example, it took me 2.5 hours by car to travel the 68 kilometers (40 miles) to my work this morning. I was in a traffic jam for 20 kilometers. It is not surprising to me then that one of our customers, an insurance company, has deployed 80 videoconferencing systems  just to avoid road travel within The Netherlands because it is so time consuming.

The failure of most vendors to spend time and effort showing the customer’s employees how to use videoconferencing is another reason why videoconferencing has not been widely adopted so far. We place a special emphasis on this. And by providing managed services, we make it as easy to use as the normal telephone. But so far too few people are aware of the giant steps in ease of use that videoconferencing has made in the last five years.

Editor: Which markets does Talk and Vision serve today and which countries will it serve in the future?

Martijn: Talk & Vision has sales offices in The Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. There are plans to establish a sales office in France in 2010. Through these and qualified partners in other countries, Talk & Vision already offered its customers worldwide support. Now as part of KPN and Getronics, Talk & Vision has business partners or offices in 90 countries to work with.

Editor: What types of managed videoconferencing service does Talk and Vision offer, and how many customers make use of the full service and 24/7 support?

Martijn: Talk and Vision has a complete offering: hardware, technical support and managed services. Our managed videoconferencing service is called MAVIS (short for managed videoconferencing integrated service: Managed Video Services). There are various different levels of support tailored to each individual customer’s requirements. As a basic service, we proactively monitor their installed base of endpoints. We build the infrastructure of the video network using their bridge or our’s. We offer a portal where they can register to use the fully managed service.

Most large customers make use of this managed service as well as our skills of integrating Polycom, Sony or TANDBERG videoconferencing endpoints and infrastructure products. If a customer has a philosophy of outsourcing, they will use our managed service in full. If they have a DIY approach and want to use their own IT people and their own bridges, we recommend letting us run the video network for the first three to six months to ensure it gets a reputation for 99 per cent reliability.

We have many success stories for managed services. For example, MAVIS manages all the video calls made by TNT the global logistics company. TNT wants to be the greenest logistics company in the world and has won awards for the sustainability program it is executing. Because they use our managed service to set up their video calls, a 10.00 am video meeting is like a 10.00 am face-to-face meeting  ... it starts bang on time and there is no need to worry about whether the technology is working properly on that day. As a result, TNT has experienced a rapid increase in the use of videoconferencing (60% to 80% per annum).

Editor: So do you have other large corporate customers that we never hear about in the press?

Martijn: Yes we do. We have for example Heineken as a global customer and Fujifilm as well.  We have Vodafone and Canon in the UK. Unfortunately, the larger the company, the more difficult it is to get permission to talk about our input on the videoconferencing side. But we do business with global leaders in Banking, Pharmacautical and Finance.

Editor: What are your other key selling points to large customers apart from the reliability of service provided by MAVIS?

Martijn: First we can make videoconferencing successful inside a company in a very short time. Let us in the door at 9.00 am and we will have a videoconferencing demonstration up and running by noon. We recognise that we must give the customer a flawless impression in the first 5 to 10 video calls. We only get one chance to prove videoconferencing is a useful productivity tool. It must be smooth and reliable if it is to become a mission critical part of their business operations.

Customers tell us they like our approach because we promise to help them to market the use of videoconferencing to their staff and employees. We help them devise and implement an internal marketing campaign and by offering training we make it simple for users to start using videoconferencing for the first time. Once started, the MAVIS managed service makes it very simple to use videoconferencing on a regular basis. In the past most vendors neglected this important aspect which ensures the customer gets a very quick return on their investment.

The other key selling point is our considerable experience in advising large companies how to build videoconferencing into their LAN and WAN network infrastructure. In the future when companies may deploy videoconferencing to 10,000 desktop users, bandwidth requirements will be larger and upgrades will be needed, making this a critical skill in our offering. As part of KPN and Getronics, our skills in this area now have a much broader base both technically and geographically.

Deployments of videoconferencing and Telepresence in the future are going to be far more complex, ranging from board rooms and meeting rooms to personal systems on desktops and laptops for the mobile worker. Talk and Vision is now superbly well equipped to meet these challenging deployments across Europe.

Editor: How many Telepresence installations have Talk and Vision made to date and how do you view the future prospects for Telepresence?

Martijn: We are installing seven Telepresence solutions for three customers. With our new links to KPN and Getronics we expect demand for Telepresence to grow considerably. But we view Telepresence as only a part of a total videoconferencing network solution and one that is unlikely to be more than 10% of the total number of endpoints installed.

There are two reasons for this judgement. First Telepresence is much more expensive and it is only the Directors and top management of a company who can justify this expense in the same way that they justified the use of corporate jets in the past.

Second with the availability of High Definition videoconferencing, the immersive experience which is claimed to be the exclusive preserve of Telepresence can be obtained in other ways at lower cost.  When the lighting and sound installations in a room are specifically designed for HD videoconferencing, it is amazing how immersive the experience can be.

For example, we partner with a company called vpod Solutions, the supplier videoconferencing lounges of a few square metres tailored for HD videoconferencing for one to four people. They were first installed for Vodafone who made them very visible; this advertised the fact that video-conferencing is available to all Vodafone staff without placing a burden on their existing meeting rooms. The next vpod demonstration facility will open in central London in October 2009.

Editor: How large a company do you think Talk and Vision will be by the end of 2012?

Martijn: We grew revenues 35% in 2008 and we are looking for an annual increase of 25% to 30% in 2009 and the following years. So the answer is at least double the 2008 size.

More important than this growth is our ambition. We aim to make Talk & Vision the largest and most competent videoconferencing specialist serving Europe. Our primary focus is on Europe but we will offer worldwide support for those companies that have global operations.

Editor: If a systems integrator inside or outside Europe wants to consider being a Talk and Vision partner, who should they contact?

Martijn: We are always interested to talk to potential partners inside and outside Europe. They should be strong enough to cover the entire territory. We are working closely with  IVCi in the United States . Anyone who wants to talk to us can e-mail me at: martijnblokland@talkandvision.com.

Editor: Thank you for these valuable insights.

Source: www.VCInsight.com