Vega Global: Purple patch

• Features

• 07/01/2021

Vega Global has had a busy 2020. At the start of the year, the global integrator announced that private equity firm Baird Capital had acquired a majority stake of its business. As Vega Global transitioned to this new phase in its journey, the Covid-19 pandemic hit and brought with it a new set of challenges for the integrator to contend with. But in the midst of disruption Vega Global has maintained its forward momentum.

Matthew Deayton, deputy chief executive officer at Vega Global, speaks about how the arrival of Baird Capital helped: “The acquisition was the stimulus for us to recalibrate the way Vega is structured at the senior level. They obviously wanted a seat on the board of directors to give guidance and strategic direction to the business. They also wanted us to formulate a management team that would execute the strategic direction set out by the board and this was a key change for us compared to how we operated in the past. We created some head office functions and brought in the traditional, organisational C-level roles and also brought in a number of country managers running our bigger operations globally [Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Japan, India] into the management team.”

The creation of the management team Deayton mentions has helped Vega Global find a new edge while retaining the aspects of the business that brought the integrator to the top in the first place. Deayton continues: “With the management team there is a means to disseminate our collective knowledge and expertise across the whole spectrum of Vega’s operations. We are conscious that there is a fine balance between introducing a layer of ‘heavy management’ dictating operations versus tapping into the ‘localised entrepreneurship’ style to foster business in a manner that suits the particular market. I think we have been able to find this balance between our traditional approach and the new direction we are taking. One of the positives [of instituting the management team] is that we have unified and are working more cohesively as a group. We are sharing knowledge and also sharing the burden of how we approach and deal with clients locally on the ground and in a global manner.”

The acquisition by Baird Capital has also placed new resources at Vega Global’s disposal. Deayton highlights how these resources are being used to take the integrator to the next level: “We are undertaking infrastructure upgrades at our offices and upgrading our operational systems. And of course, Baird Capital being a private equity firm, they are always on the lookout for acquisitions. There is nothing specific on the horizon at this point in time and there is no specific agenda so any future acquisition would be fairly opportunistic.”

The strengthening of positions is being contemplated taking into account the current business climate. Deayton says: “We’ve started preliminary operations in places like Vietnam and Thailand and we are going to put some effort into expanding these operations. Our clients have obviously been impacted by the pandemic and business is not moving as quickly as we would like. But that is just a function of the global situation and we still remain very keen on the Asia Pacific and Middle East regions. The European market, as the data shows and as everyone I am sure is aware, is recovering at the slowest rate out of all the regions so we will be focusing our energies very keenly on APAC.”

But perhaps more interesting is Vega Global’s approach to strengthening its position by bringing on people with the right expertise to propel the integrator forward. In August 2020, Vega Global announced the appointment of Heather Li to the newly created role of director for digital workplace solutions for the group. Li brings over 20 years of experience from the ‘client’s side’ of commercial real estate.

Deayton believes the hire points at a new direction for Vega Global: “Being able to recruit appropriate people into the organisation is going to help us grow the business in the right direction. It is no secret that the AV world is now firmly assimilating into the broader technology ecosystem. This is very evident in corporate spaces and we are finding that more corporate clients are taking a holistic approach to rolling out digital workplace solutions. For any integrator looking to be relevant and to grow it is a natural progression to expand your expertise to take in the whole picture. Our focus moving forward is very much going to be on delivering digital workplace capabilities to the market and we are in deep discussions with a lot of our clients about how we can deliver those capabilities and services to them.”

Deayton believes the convergence of AV with technology ecosystems and the disruption caused by Covid-19 have altered client expectations. Luckily for Vega Global, its strategic partnership with American integrator AVI-SPL has provided it access to a useful answer.

Deayton says: “AVI-SPL Symphony is a really strong tool and having the ability to plug into a client’s suite of meeting rooms and devices and being able to monitor and maintain them remotely is extremely valuable. Especially in these times, not having to send people to work on-premises or having engineers walking through spaces is a compelling solution for clients. From our perspective, it is more efficient when it comes to staffing and resource management. I believe that having the tools for remote monitoring and remote maintenance activities, having such a suite is going to become a prominent part of our offering. There has always been a requirement in the AV industry to provide managed services and maintenance functions and the challenge has always been the limitations of the tools available to us for providing these services remotely and efficiently.”

Deayton concludes: “AV as a service is something that we are very keen on developing and we have come quite a long way. The challenge is that a client might have 30 to 40 meeting rooms, and these will all be deployed with equipment and the client will ask for an annuity that they can pay over five years or three years or whatever terms they agree on. The nature of business in Asia is such that finding a lending structure that supports this type of arrangement is difficult. We have a number of plans that allow us to do this in certain jurisdictions. In Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan and Australia, where the financial infrastructure is robust it is easier for us to go down the AV-as-a-service route and even hardware-as-a-service type arrangements. We have all the pieces in place, and we can package on-going support services across the terms of these contracts. We are now in the process of rolling it out.”