Mark Adams - A brief history, Part 1

Added by Mark Adams, 11 months ago.

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I realise that I have been involved with the collaboration business for many more years than I care to remember.

At the time - early 1990's - I was working for RG Jones who are audio specialists - the only audio company that I am aware of that are by appointment to Her Majesty The Queen - selling Installed Audio Systems. We did a lot of work with the US based company Shure Brothers - manufacturers of some of the best microphones in the world - and they asked if we interested in selling their board room audioconferencing system, the ST 3000.

The ST 3000 was a ground breaking system at the time. To fit in with the board rooms one could have a choice of real wood finishes - Walnut or Ash. The units cost over $6,000 at the time. Interestingly I have just searched for a picture of the ST 3000 and found one on e-bay the starting bid is $19.95!!!

To sell the ST 3000 required site visits and numerous demonstrations. The system was quasi-duplex, not quite duplex but a lot better than simplex speech. The main customers were large mutlinational companies - often finance or technology companies - who needed to conference between their head office in the USA and their European Headquarters. The systems sold well and I was asked to set up a division within the company to concentrate upon Audio Conferencing.

I went to a conferencing trade show in the US and saw a new Audio Conferencing product from a start-up company called Polycom. They had a really neat duplex conferencing system called the SoundStation. The system was 1/3rd of the price of the ST3000, looked fabulous, and worked really well.

I met with Polycom when they came over to the UK and became one of the first resellers in the UK. The other reseller was a small company called BT!!. To this day I can't understand why Polycom chose BT instead of RG Jones as the main reseller......

One interesting fact, someone at Polycom made a slight error when they were registering the Polycom name in Europe and found it already belonged to a French company. So Polycom became Polyspan in Europe. The SoundStation was very successful and so were RG Jones, we were selling about 25% of all the SoundStations sold in the UK.

As the business matured I looked for additional products to complement the Polycom Conference Phones. The obvious choice were audio conferencing bridges so I set up RGJones as a reseller for the European market leader Spectel.

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Edward Charvet, 11 months ago

It is thought that the Queen had "ones Walnut ST 3000" for conferences and that she was up with technology even then. Good to have you blogging with us Mark. Look forward to hearing more from you.