The newly-appointed CEO for projector company InFocus, Mark Housley, has bold plans for the company and its recently acquired brand, Jupiter Systems. Nial Anderson speaks with him to find out more.
Just over a month into his new role as CEO for InFocus, Mark Housley is wasting no time. He is boundlessly enthusiastic about the potential of the company and its new acquisition, the videowall and collaboration specialist Jupiter Systems.
“We’re strategically opportunistic and will look for partners and products where we can be successful not just selling millions, but hundreds of millions of products to bolster substantial growth,” he told InAVate, shortly after being appointed. Housley is no stranger to InFocus, a visual communication company established more than 20 years ago in Portland, Oregon. He has been on the board of directors since 2009, having previously served as CEO of several tech and IT firms.
In taking InFocus and Hayward, California-based Jupiter Systems forward, he points to the huge market for conferencing systems as being the key to growth.
“It’s the market that InFocus has always seen,” he said, “There are 100 million conference rooms in the world with conferencing equipment being the biggest concentration of technology in those rooms.
“Polycom have sold five million audio conferencing systems into these rooms but they’re still terrifically under penetrated. Nothing’s changed about the fundamental market except for the technologies.”
So rather than developing products to meet expected future nuances in the market, how does Housley plan to tap into this potential on the scale that he has planned?
“I’m interested in selling a lot of things to a lot of people – mostly business people,” he said. “I don’t want my system to just be in one conference room, I want it to be in every conference room. We’re not going for cheap; it’s not the low price of the product, it’s the affordability of the system that we’re aiming for. It needs to be easier to use and not have the cost of a small country’s GDP.
“I’m not really a software guy and I’m not a box guy; I came to InFocus to offer solutions to problems. Most of the companies that sell technology let other companies put the systems together. That really limits the market you’re in.
“Take full telepresence from Cisco with 20 people in five locations, that’s half a million euros. Goldman Sachs can afford that, but a small fire department with five stations cannot afford that with public money. However they can achieve the same thing with five Mondopads across the department. We’re trying to drag the entry level down just as the iPhone has done. It’s still kind of expensive but what you get for your money is amazing.”
How will the evolution of InFocus and Jupiter serve this market, and how will they complement each other?
“There’s a tremendous amount of synergy with what we’re doing now and how Jupiter can help with that,” Housley explained.
“InFocus has been a leader in offering technology that is affordable and relatively easy to use. It’s still kind of complicated but it’s getting a lot better and there’s a lot of room within it to do interesting things. So Jupiter comes along and I say ‘wow’; great high-end graphics, their control stuff is excellent and they know how to make great products. But if you look at Canvas and some of the new hardware stuff they’re doing, that really dovetails with our vision to make immersive, engaging conversation with multiple people in multiple places.
“One of the very attractive prospects that Jupiter has is a fantastic engineering team. We have acquired a great software development team and a small but highly talented hardware team as well.”
Housley says the synergy between the two brands will become apparent in 2016, when new products emerge on the market. Not giving too much away, he described what integrators can expect.
“You will see in the first quarter real evidence of integration and hopefully a few things that will surprise you,” he said.
“And if you look at what you can do with Canvas and look at what we’ve been talking about with Saturn and Mondopad you could start to put those together in your mind and see there’s some interesting extensions for both party’s markets, and maybe a few things that you wouldn’t have guessed.
“We have a large multinational engineering team now with lots of capability – you’ll see lots of products emerging. Most of my efforts will be finding out how we distribute, create a channel that can support this stuff and make it available and useful to a much wider bunch of people.”
In Europe, this will involve building a team to market the brands and the companies’ have nearly 30 staff concentrated in western Europe including in the UK, France and Germany.
“We’re going to engage with a channel that is used to selling thousands and tens of thousands of things, despite there being many competitors in that channel,” he explained. “If you look at what Microsoft is doing with its Surface Hub and Skype for Business strategy I think I could do a lot worse than taking their approach.
“We sell in 80 countries. Where you see me making investments is in the countries that have a lot of people and a lot of businesses that have a real need to have rich collaboration tools to help them do business better. We’re going where the money, networks and people are – places with good bandwidth and multiple locations.”
This portfolio building will accelerate the companies’ growth, he predicts.
“We will work with technology leaders in the field to enhance what they offer, as well as finding other Jupiters of the world to make part of the family. I don’t have an acquisition program and I don’t have a big pot of money allocated for that but I’m a Silicon Valley type of opportunist and ‘not invented here’ isn’t in my vocabulary. It is a case of finding a team that I like – I don’t care what goodies they have because that is useless without a good team. That vision has to align or expand or deepen our existing vision, we’re not just trying to acquire a bunch of stuff and cobble it together in a cloak of many colours, that’s not my style.”
What trends does he see out there that will affect how the ongoing technology offerings will evolve?
“Passive devices are becoming less and less interesting,” he explained, “Collaboration implies interaction, so touch enabled and wireless. You should be able to come in and find Air Play or Mirror Cast or something similar. The real trends are using these five standards out there, but the challenge is supporting multi-protocol open devices that make it easy to get at all this computing power people are throwing at us.”
On a basic level, he explained, the companies’ products are still competing with two people sitting face-to-face having drinks with a paper and pencil or a PDA.
“We’re a systems house; we need hardware because software isn’t enough to control the experience,” he concluded. “Apple knows that and a whole bunch of people who focused on one or another are finding that this really limits you. We now have a relationship in place with Foxconn that allows us to build as much of this stuff as we can create demand for at a quality level no one else can meet.”