AV Integration spoke to Omega Digital Company Director, Michael Kellaway, in a recent interview, where he shared his professional journey, his opinions about current trends and vision for the future.
Omega Digital – headquartered in Johannesburg, South Africa – has established a reputation for being one of the leading collaboration experts in the country. In addition to being a leading AV integrator, Omega has gained a strong foothold in the collaboration services market, providing their clients with a unique service offering and making the company a trendsetter in the local AV integration industry. Over the past five years, Omega Digital has become a trusted provider of collaboration services for some of the largest enterprises, not only in this country, but also on the African continent.
HOW DID YOU START YOUR CAREER IN THE PROFESSIONAL AUDIOVISUAL FIELD?
I first got involved in the professional integration business through family, and – to be honest – it was sort of an accident.
My brother is the founder of Omega Digital, and we are very close. I used to work in financial services overseas, but I moved back to South Africa to take a mini-retirement with my wife. We were, quite literally, about to pack up and move back to the UK permanently when my brother sent me an email with the title: “The Elephant in the Room.”
He told me to have a look and see what I thought about the professional AV integration industry, even though I didn’t know anything about it. I flew up to Johannesburg from Cape Town and had a meeting with our other business partner, Stuart Pringle [the COO of the company], and I thought: “Why not? I’ll try it for a year.”
It has turned out to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I’ve fallen in love with the industry, and it has become a huge passion. The highlight is seeing how the business has grown over the last five years. It’s taken a lot of hard work and energy – but it’s rewarding to see the growth.
“The highlight is seeing how the business has grown over the last five years. It’s taken a lot of hard work and energy – but it’s rewarding to see the growth.”
Director at Omega Digital, Michael Kellaway
WHAT HAS BEEN THE MOST IMPORTANT TECHNOLOGY TO EMERGE DURING YOUR CAREER?
Cloud computing is the obvious answer. But beyond that, there are three things on the periphery at the moment that I’m very interested in.
Number one is AV over IP – this will be a massive game-changer in the industry. Omega Digital is upping our ability to get into the network space and all future-spec buildings we will be working on going forward will be AVoIP-led. Also, we will set up AVoIP solutions that we can support remotely, which will have a huge impact on our ability to respond to the client’s needs in real time.
The other thing I’m very interested in is augmented reality. While I am not a huge fan of virtual reality, I can see a tremendous amount of benefit in being able to take the digital world and overlay it on the real world. I see this having a massive influence on the AV world: I think augmented reality is the future of AV. We’re having a close look at this technology at the moment, and we plan to attend a number of conferences on this topic, so that we have the opportunity to start playing around with a few basic models.
Thirdly, I am looking forward to the release of 5G. When it comes out – predicted to be around 2020 – 5G is going to have massive implications for our industry, especially around augmented reality (AR) and other emergent technologies. Currently, in order to have a truly seamless AR experience, you need to be in an environment with huge amounts of bandwidth. However, with the deployment of 5G, you will have the bandwidth available to enable people to use an AR headset on a factory floor for effective, time-saving upskilling and training, as well as a wide variety of other applications.
Michael Kellaway at the New York Stock Exchange in May 2018.
WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE TRENDS THAT WILL INFORM THE FUTURE OF PROFESSIONAL AV INTEGRATION?
One of the fundamental trends that is changing the landscape of our industry is the shift from being systems integrators to being service integrators, which is something that Omega Digital has adopted quite aggressively. As much as we care about the finer points of the technology that we deploy in rooms, end users don’t care about this: they want their rooms to work so that they can get on with doing business.
One of the biggest challenges that businesses have to overcome in deploying reliable and sustainable collaboration solutions is that your traditional IT department is not equipped to take care of your collaboration needs.
In IT, recognised areas of expertise include network, data centre, desktop support and security. Collaboration is not considered as a part of a traditional IT model. Then consider that collaboration as a discipline is broken up into five industries, including AV, video conferencing, unified communications, workspace management and digital signage. It is impossible to hire one expert that can consult on all of these aspects of collaboration.
In answer to this challenge, we are currently looking to take collaboration as a fully-fledged service to the market through our Fuse Model. Omega has developed a blanket MSA contract that we put in place with the customer, to ensure that they receive everything that they need from a collaboration perspective as a service. By adopting this sort of outsourced approach, a business is able to deploy state-of-the-art collaboration solutions that work efficiently and reliably – while eliminating the burden of capital expenditure on equipment that has a high rate of redundancy. Also, there is no need to hunt down and permanently employ a group of collaboration experts to run and maintain your AV, unified communications, video conferencing, workspace management and digital signage systems.
WHAT CHALLENGES ARE FACING INTEGRATORS IN THE CONTEMPORARY MARKET?
Many in the professional integration market point out that the commoditisation of technology presents varied challenges for traditional integration professionals.
The systems that people are using might be getting smaller and simpler, but – on the other hand – there are a lot more of them. As such, clients are sometimes in greater need of expert input to ensure that they deploy the right solution to get a return on their investment. Thanks to the internet, decision-makers can start interrogating the kind of collaboration solutions that are best for their needs and end-users have access to a wider range of technology. Actually, the commoditisation of technology has been a good thing for Omega. You might not see as many big boardrooms as you would in the past, but you still see them – and they are connecting to hundreds of huddle spaces, as well as people dialling in from their desktops.
As such, a big play that we have in our product and service offering is unified communications support. We are providing answers to client’s questions such as: How do you bring Skype for Business into your meeting room? How do you go from a Skype for Business call or instant message to being able to book a meeting space to allow you to gather your people in one space to solve a problem or take advantage of an opportunity? At Omega, we look at the entire workflow of an organisation and provide solutions to the historical challenge that, sometimes, an organisation’s best people aren’t sitting in the same office – or even in the same country. We find ways of connecting resources throughout an organisation to assist businesses with their day-to-day operations.
“Sometimes, an organisation’s best people aren’t sitting in the same office – or even in the same country. At Omega, we find ways of connecting resources throughout an organisation to assist businesses with their day-to-day operations.”
Director at Omega Digital, Michael Kellaway
“Omega is proud to say that we have had at least one team in an African country every single working day of 2017.”
Director at Omega Digital, Michael Kellaway
“As much as we care about the finer points of the technology that we deploy in rooms, end users don’t care about this: they want their rooms to work so that they can get on with what they are trying to achieve in their day-to-day business.”
Director at Omega Digital, Michael Kellaway
WHAT ARE YOUR GOALS AND ASPIRATIONS FOR OMEGA AS A COMPANY?
Africa is exploding for us at the moment, and we, therefore, have a 10- to 15-year plan to grow the business across the African continent. According to company reports, 2017 was our busiest year on the continent, and it looks like we will beat those figures in 2018. We are proud to say that we have had at least one team in an African country every single working day of 2017, providing support and looking after our customers. Currently, we are still largely operating out of South Africa and flying into country, but we see that changing in the very near future.
We have aspirations to grow internationally – taking what we do for a very small developing market to the international arena and see how we fare. There is a lot of legacy in some of these bigger, more attractive markets, and there is some very stiff competition – but I think that we offer value regarding the way we approach our industry, and I am interested to see how we would fare.
WHAT KEEPS YOU MOTIVATED ON A MORE PERSONAL LEVEL?
From a professional perspective, what motivates me is the people that we invest in as a business. I have been in sales for a long time, and there is nothing better than ringing the bell and putting a big deal up on the board. However, to be honest with you, the next day it is forgotten, and you are moving on to the next target.
The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is the ability to grow the business, and thinking of ways to keep it growing – but it is also seeing the growth in our people that really keeps me motivated and invested.
We’ve have been witness to some amazing stories of people who have come from being petrol attendant and – through investment, mentorship and training – have become senior team leaders in the business. I don’t have a car – I Uber everywhere – and I hired one of my Uber drivers because I saw talent in him. It is such a privilege to see him grow and become a part of our unique team. We place a lot of importance of providing our people with opportunities to learn, grow and achieve their goals – including international certification. This ethos has given us all the confidence to know that “Yes, we can do whatever we set our minds to.”
On a personal level, I have two little boys and an amazing wife, and my family keeps me highly motivated. We like watching movies, going to new restaurants, spending time with friends – normal South African kind of stuff. I also exercise almost every single day, and I love to travel. We have got dogs, and we like to hike, so we take our dogs into the bush as often as we can.
