Cinos has folded its separate Unified Communications firm, Cinos Communication Services (CCS), into its core business. The move follows a four-year incubation period for CCS and will see combined revenues of more than £20 million.
The company said the merger acknowledges the market’s need for IT and AV convergence at the customer level, where AV assets are increasingly purchased as part of the complete IT solution. The unified business’ primary market will be the public sector, with around 70 percent of customer projects being NHS, police, and blue light centred.
Johanna Guest, Managing Director at Cinos, said: “The rapid convergence of networked audio-visual technologies means that AV and IT departments are inevitably moving closer to one another, audio-visual assets are fast becoming IT assets, sharing mutual infrastructure and resources.
“We estimate that, with our customer base, we’re now seeing about 85 percent of procurement of AV sitting with IT as opposed to facilities. Three years ago, this was 50 percent. We’re adjusting our business to suit our customers’ procurement narrative and the time is right to unite our two specialist teams.”
Cinos Limited is anticipating revenues of £14 million this calendar year, with Cinos Communications Services sitting on a run rate of about £7 million. It expects a full trading year post-merger will produce a combined business trade of over £20 million.
The merger of the two businesses creates a broader sales force and a single sales and solutions (pre-sales) team, as well as a wider vendor offering for customers. Led by Executive Directors Karl Deady, Steve Franklin and Dan Worman, Cinos has around 100 staff in offices in Camberley, Cranfield, Derby and the North West of England. Market presence in Scotland, Ireland and France (Paris) has been established in recent months, adding to established business operations in the USA and Singapore.
Executive Director at Cinos, Dan Worman, said: “The acceleration of convergence between AV and IT solutions means we wanted to engage with our customers in a way that brought them the best procurement deals and the best cross-solution service, so merging the businesses was the obvious thing to do. The bonds between the two firms are exceedingly strong; we’ve worked on increasing the number of joint ventures we collaborate on and have a legacy of delivering large public sector projects together.”
