The Product Got Better and the Market Got Smaller

The Software Settled

By 2017 the software had stopped trying to be everything.

It arrived in two modes. Prysm-Go was for the ordinary meeting: one touch to present, whiteboard or place a video call, no sign-in, no account, no preparation. The signed-in mode carried the full multi-site collaboration capability, and it integrated with the video-conferencing platforms — Teams, Zoom and the rest — rather than competing with them.

This came about as a learning from customer feedback: eighty or ninety per cent of meetings are somebody sharing a screen and talking about it, and a platform that requires you to sign in before it will show you a document is asking for a behaviour change nobody agreed to.

Meet people where they already are, and integrate with what they already use. It took three years and a great deal of money to arrive at that sentence.

The Display's Second Generation

The hardware moved at the same time, and it moved further.

No more modules. The second generation was a seamless panel, touch-interactive by default, with the software loaded as standard rather than specified alongside. Higher resolution, better display parameters, a genuinely better picture. The flagship was 225 inches — the largest single-panel touch display in the world, and it looked it.

For anyone who had spent six years explaining why a wall made of tiles was better than the alternatives, a seamless panel of that size was not an incremental improvement. It was the argument, won.

From Limitless to Three

The consequence was that the product line shrank.

Where the first generation could be configured to almost any size and geometry, the second came in three sizes — 135, 190 and 225 inches — alongside the LCD range for smaller rooms.

That was the right decision, and Part Two is the reason why. Every bespoke wall was close to a new product: new engineering, new integration, new risk, a sales cycle of three to six months and an installation cycle of the same again. A business built on those cannot scale, cannot forecast and cannot be valued. Three standard sizes is the correct answer to that problem, and any competent board would have insisted on it.

Our market, unfortunately, was made of the thing that had just been discontinued.

The Segment That Disappeared

The obvious half of the problem was the easy half. Our business had been built on configured custom walls, so the mega-display segment simply went away. Three sizes were workable and we learned to convert a requirement to the closest fit. Not every project survives that translation, but most did.

The half that mattered was technical, and nobody outside engineering would have flagged it as a commercial decision at all.

The new product was designed to use the compute already provisioned for the software platform to handle its inputs. Independent image processing was value-engineered out, because it reduced the complexity and cost of the system — which, on any reasonable reading of a bill of materials, it did.

The effect was that a direct video source could no longer be displayed natively. It had to be routed through our own software.

There were workarounds. We used them, and they were good enough to land a 190-inch control room for a national oil and gas company after the change.

The net position was that our addressable market went from custom walls plus enterprise displays to enterprise displays only.

Read that against Part One and Part Two. Television studios. Control rooms. Command centres. Broadcast environments where a video feed must appear on a wall natively, without passing through anybody's collaboration platform first. That was the foundation the region was built on, and the setting of its best installations.

Nobody decided to exit it. There was no meeting at which the Middle East was traded for manufacturing simplicity. It fell out of a component-level trade-off taken several thousand miles from the market that depended on it — and the people who could have priced that trade-off were not in the room.

The Orders We Refused

Two projects made it concrete, and neither of them was lost in the usual sense.

The first was a Qatar tender we had been specified into four years earlier. Four years of consultant engagement, requirement development and specification language, finally reaching the market. A job already in the pocket.

The second was a defence application, a new mega-wall, for which we were pre-qualified.

Both had been specified around the older units — the configured walls that were now being wound down. We could have accepted the awards. What we could not do was deliver them safely.

Building to a discontinued specification meant delivery twelve to eighteen months out, with the company producing and holding stock for that entire period against project values that were extremely large. It was in no condition to absorb the consequence if anything slipped.

So we killed them. We took the decision not to collect an order rather than collect it and face what came after.

I raised it with head office. Going back was not an option given the position the company was in, and I understood why.

The First Surgery

By the middle of 2017 we were seeding the second generation into the market while the first-generation stock ran down. The new product would not launch properly until 2018.

It did not get that long. The company had grown heavy, and by July 2017 keeping it alive required surgery rather than trimming. Most of the United States went. Almost all of Europe went, effectively overnight.

The Middle East lost forty per cent of its people — eleven down to seven. The service team was reduced, and the channel manager and pre-sales specialist — the two roles Part Two describes us adding with such care — were gone. We were back roughly where we had been eighteen months earlier.

Note the order of those two events, because it is the part I would want a reader to take away.

To the company's credit, none of this arrived without warning. Communication had been open across every geography throughout, and the writing had been on the wall for anyone reading it. That did not stop it landing hard when it came, and the scale of it in the larger regions was something nobody had prepared for.

What it left us with was an addressable market that had narrowed, a product line about to change underneath us, and a team too small to sell the way the new strategy required.

Handing Over the Legacy

The question was not how to grow the region alone. It was how to grow it without adding an army of people we could no longer justify or afford.

The answer we chose was a distributor, and the reasoning was not primarily about reach. The real intention was more complete than that: we were looking to outsource the model itself — sales, pre-sales, service, and if it could be made to work, customer success.

We were moving to an enterprise sales motion with account-based selling, and there was no version of the sales team we had left that could run it. A distributor would also extend us into new geographies and host demonstration equipment in the markets that mattered.

The new product sat at the intersection of audiovisual and unified communications, so the right partner sat there too. We looked at both camps and found the same problem in each. Most candidates were box movers, servicing demand that already existed. We did not need somebody to service demand. We needed somebody to generate it — a value-added distributor who worked with channel partners to develop solutions and get projects specified.

The criteria from Part One still applied: customer access, technical capability, commercial commitment, willingness to invest in training, tools and spares. What we added was value: solution engineering, installation capability, service capability.

We found them through an introduction in Silicon Valley — a friend of a friend of the founder. We had been trying to reach the same distributor locally for some time and getting nowhere in particular. The introduction happened in California, in front of the seamless display at head office, and that meeting did what a year of regional approaches had not.

They carried unified communications, professional AV and cyber security portfolios, with an in-house solutions engineering team, and they were persuaded by the business case precisely because of what we had spent six years building in the region.

Which is also the uncomfortable part. We were handing over our legacy to them.

The core sales team saw that clearly and raised it with me, and they were not wrong about what was happening. Everything they had built relationships around — the accounts, the consultants, the specification work — was being routed through somebody else.

What I could not tell them, because I did not know it either, was that the structure we were building would be the thing that carried us through what came next.

They trusted me. Nobody left.

And what the distributor brought was not what a vendor usually expects from one.

The agreement was signed to coincide with the second-generation launch. We launched through them, at their own demonstration centres in Dubai and Riyadh, announced it at GITEX, and gave them exclusivity on the new line. The first generation stayed with us, direct, along with the existing orders and service contracts — there was no advantage in complicating arrangements that were working.

The launch landed. Early references came quickly: a 225-inch installation for a government sports authority in Dubai, for a briefing room and event space; another 225-inch for a federal ministry in Abu Dhabi, in the minister's own meeting room; five 190-inch displays for a national utility in Riyadh, in its executive leadership development centre. Those three gave the distributor something to sell from on day one.

Did it work?

Yes and no, and the honest answer depends entirely on the circumstances. Given the position the company was in, it was a blessing in disguise. Had the company been in the shape it was in during our early years, the same arrangement would have been a compromise. The problems were operational rather than strategic, and the recurring one was transparency: we did not have the visibility into pipeline and progress that we had when we ran the motion ourselves.

And what they thought they were buying deserves stating, because it is the same misreading a lot of distributors make.

We sold them the second-generation vision and the enterprise rhythm from Part Two. What they heard was repeatable sales, recurring service and subscription revenue, and a tender lock-in mechanism with a proven history in this region. For a multi-brand distributor that is leverage — something to carry across the rest of the portfolio.

They got all of it in theory. In practice the sales velocity never arrived. It was a new product with a new sales motion in front of new tenders, and twenty-four months later the macro environment slowed and then stopped altogether.

Square One

In March 2019 came the second reduction. Seven people became five, which was square one on manning.

The region absorbed it better than it should have, and the reason was mostly timing. The distributor structure was by then in place, and we had pipeline and orders to execute. It was difficult rather than fatal. What it required was staying positive and staying communicative — with the team internally, and with customers and partners externally, at exactly the point when saying nothing would have been easier.

Nothing was stopped. Installations under warranty were maintained, projects mid-delivery were completed, and the region is still renewing service contracts on that work today.

For me it was a return to the beginning. I had started the region alone and had never stopped being hands-on. Of the five people left, three were service engineers. The work went back to being what it was in 2010.

It was also in this stretch that I became VP EMEA — not as a promotion in any ordinary sense, but because Europe's team had been let go and somebody had to keep the show running and build on whatever remained. I contacted every partner personally; I had met most of them at trade shows over the years. The message was continuity and support, and the first practical step was getting them working again by routing service calls through them. Then a long road trip across five countries, fronted by one of the Middle East salespeople, meeting partner teams and restarting conversations.

By 2019 I had signed up a new partner in the UK and a demonstration unit was sold into London, installed in a facility in Central London. It was commissioned in June 2020, in the middle of COVID, so the launch it was meant to power never really happened.

And the effect of the refused orders finally became visible around here, because a pipeline does not empty all at once. Between the shrinking team, the move to a distributor and the two segments quietly leaving the addressable market, it arrived gradually and then it was simply there.

What COVID Did, and What It Did Not

It arrived without warning, in the middle of a road-show sequence for the distributor. I went to ISE wearing a mask, came back and did the UAE and Qatar legs, flew to Saudi Arabia, and got home shortly before everything closed.

Our installation team was less fortunate. They were in Riyadh, commissioning the utility project, and they stayed there for nearly three months because there were no flights. We eventually brought them back to the UAE on a charter at the end of June.

The counter-intuitive thing about the period is that there was nothing counter-intuitive about it. Nothing new grew. No wave of command centres, no surge in emergency operations rooms. What came through was work that had already started before the world closed — including the largest order the region had ever taken, a public sector enterprise in Riyadh: seven rooms and a mini auditorium, a 225-inch display, five 190s and two 135s.

Two mega projects were the whole story of 2020 to 2022, for us and for the distributor. Their revenue is what carried both of us — and the service annuity underneath, which the next section is about, is what kept the region operating while we waited for them to complete.

And the pattern from Part Two survived even this. If any period was going to convert the Middle East to distributed, cross-site collaboration, it was the one where nobody could be in the same building. It did not. What COVID did instead was embed Teams and Zoom so deeply into how people work that they stopped being tools and became infrastructure.

We had neither the muscle nor the bandwidth to position ourselves as an alternative to that. So we did not. We were, and remain, a complementary solution — something that makes the meeting better, not something that replaces the way the meeting happens.

What Actually Paid the Bills

Through all of it — the cutbacks, the handover to the distributor, two years of closed borders — the region kept generating cash. It is worth being precise about where it came from, because it was not where the strategy had been pointing.

It was hardware service revenue.

Not subscriptions. There were some, and they were small. The annuity came from service contracts, and a service contract attaches to every LPD display we had ever put on a wall — first generation or second, custom or standard. The largest of them sat on the mega projects: the studios, the command centres, the campuses, the big configured walls built in the years when the company could still build them.

Which is the point, and it is structural rather than sentimental.

The addressable market had narrowed, new business had slowed, two segments had quietly left — and none of that touched the money coming in from equipment already on walls and already under contract.

There is a line in Part One that reads differently now. Half the team was support, and the reasoning at the time was commercial: in a market with no references, the support ratio is the sales strategy. That was a decision taken in 2011 to win first orders. A decade later, the annuity from what those engineers installed and kept running was the floor under everything else.

We are still renewing some of those contracts.

The Software Leaves, and the Product Comes Home

By the end of 2020 the software business and the hardware business separated. Cloud hosting stopped, the platform passed to a new owner, and what remained refocused on the display fundamentals the company had been founded on.

Regionally, we handled it in two stages. First we announced the transfer and asked customers to sign a new agreement with the incoming owner, offering free migration to the on-premise version as an alternative. When the new owner subsequently discontinued the cloud service as well, we migrated everyone who was left. For four or five global accounts whose workflow genuinely required cloud, we set up a private cloud for each, operated and maintained by the relevant partner.

No customer in this region was on cloud by the end of it. We converted all of them, and we lost nobody.

The on-premise version stayed with the hardware business, where it was developed further into an all-in-one: collaboration native on the display, and cross-room connectivity handled by Teams and Zoom integrations.

Which is, almost exactly, what we had been selling in the Middle East since 2014.

That is not a vindication and it should not be read as one. The region had not been cleverer than head office. It had been closer to a set of customers whose behaviour was easier to observe than to argue with, and it had adapted to them because there was no alternative. The company reached the same configuration eventually, having paid a great deal to get there. The information had been available the whole time. We were not structured in a way that could act on it.

What I Got Wrong

Three things. The first still bothers me.

We never ran the motion we had restructured to run. The whole case for the distributor was account-based selling into enterprise: identify the accounts that matter, work them deliberately, build the relationships before the requirement exists. That is what we described to them, and what we told ourselves we were doing.

It is not what happened. The distributor did what distributors do and pushed the channel to bring in leads. We responded to what arrived — a conversation at a trade show, an inbound enquiry, an introduction from a partner. The large wins we did take were closed by account-based selling, but only after somebody else had produced the lead. We never mapped an ideal customer profile and worked a list against it.

At the time that was a bandwidth question, and the bandwidth genuinely was not there. It was still the thing we should have done.

And the market we had remaining was bigger than we treated it as. It would be easy to finish this article believing the segment narrowed and we managed the consequences honourably. That is not the whole of it.

The two largest orders of the entire period were enterprise deals — the public-sector project in Riyadh and the utility in the same city — and one of them was larger than most of the custom-wall projects had ever been. There are substantial enterprise customers across this region, and they reward the vendor who maps them and goes after them deliberately. Had we required the distributor to work that way, or done it ourselves, we would have done considerably better than we did.

Their priorities were not our priorities, which is a subject deserving an article of its own rather than a paragraph here.

And we should not have built the team we then had to cut. Part Two records, with some pride, that we hired fewer people than head office had mandated. Looking back, it was still too many. We built up to eleven through 2016 and were cutting back inside eighteen months. That is not prudence, it is a whipsaw — you pay to recruit, you pay to train, you lose what those people learned, and the ones who remain draw their own conclusions about how solid the plan is. Growing more slowly and holding would have been better than growing and reversing.

If You Are Entering a Region Now

Three things carry across from this, and none of them is about displays.

A product roadmap is a market-scope document, whether or not anyone treats it as one. Every simplification removes something. Value engineering a component out of a bill of materials is an engineering decision on the page and a market decision in practice, and the person who can tell you which segment it deletes is sitting in the region, not in the product meeting. Ask before it ships, not after the pipeline thins.

Build the annuity early, because it is what you will live on. Service contracts, support agreements, maintenance on installed work — the unglamorous recurring revenue that never features in a strategy deck. When the product changes underneath a region, new business is the first thing to stop and the installed base is the last. A region with a maintained installed base has time to adapt. A region without one has a cost line and a shrinking forecast.

And a distributor does not change your sales motion. You do. Appointing one moves the transaction, the logistics and the credit risk, and those are worth having. It does not decide which thirty accounts matter, and it will not work them for you unless working them is written into the agreement and someone checks.

Where This Leaves the Region

By 2023 the arguments in this article had run their course. The product had found its shape, the channel had found its structure, and the market had told us, repeatedly and in more than one way, what it was willing to buy.

After that, the work was about staying relevant.