ViewSonic Storms Into Wireless Market
The visual display company also said that the company's new wireless business unit will be headed by Greg Avera, who spent the last three years as vice president of U.S. channel sales for wireless rival D-Link.
"We are moving into this segment very aggressively," said Avera, who spent five years at ViewSonic before going to D-Link. "The most important thing for us is not to try and capture the leading commodity wireless market share in the first quarter in the business. The most important thing is to make sure we have the right product line, a good channel strategy, and a good overall value proposition for our channel partners."
Avera, who will report directly to ViewSonic Americas President Christopher Franey, said the multimillion dollar effort will leverage ViewSonic's longstanding relationships with its 8,000 plus channel partners. The products will be available through ViewSonic distributors and resellers as well as retailers including Fry's Electronics, Amazon.com and other outlets.
ViewSonic in total unveiled nine new wireless products including what it calls the centerpiece of its lineup, the 80 Gbyte WMG80 and 120 Gbyte WMG120 wireless media gateways and the WMA 100 wireless media adapter.
The media gateways and adapter are aimed at breaking new ground in storing, distributing and displaying digital content including streaming video, audio, photographs and other media, said Avera.
The gateways, which provide the capablity to store and wirelessly deliver digital content to two or more displays at a time, function both as 802.11g wireless routers and network attached storage devices. Combined with the router, the gateways are aimed at making it much easer for customers that want to quickly access a wide range of digital content, Avera said. Besides the new gateways and adapter, ViewSonic also announced a new wireless print server, wireless access point and repeater, wireless router, a wireless USB adapter, a wireless PCI adapter, and a wireless notebook adapter.
ViewSonic said the products are all primarily aimed at the wireless home networking market. But ViewSonic VARs said the products, which were formally unveiled at Demo Mobile in La Jolla, Calif. and will be available in the fourth quarter, will have a big impact in the corporate market because of the breakthrough digital content management capabities and video streaming performance. They said the new product lineup is going to hit wireless rivals such as Cisco Systems Linksys, D-Link and Netgear hard.
"This is going to shake up the market," said Tarun Sachdeva, a corporate sales manager for Microgear, a San Francisco ViewSonic partner who has already seen a demo of the new products. "The streaming video quality of these products is outstanding. I think ViewSonic is going to end up being the leader in this market because they are so strong in the channel."
Sachdeva compared ViewSonic's wireless blitz to the company's push several years ago into the display projector market. "Once they got into projectors, they totally changed the market," he said.
Sachdeva expects ViewSonic to push the price peformance envelope with aggressively priced innovative products that offer new functionality. The new WMG80 with a WMA 100 media adapter has an estimated street price of $699. The WMG120 with a WMA 100 adapter has an estimated street price of $799.
Oli Thordarson, CEO of Alvaka Networks, Huntington Beach, Calif., said the new ViewSonic gateways open up a new segment in the wireless market focusing on digital media distribution and content management for business clients and home users.
"I think ViewSonic has taken audio visual media distribution to a new level in terms of efficiency and ease and quality of distribution," he said. "I think where ViewSonic is going with this is what the Macintosh did with the interface at the desktop they are doing for the digital media space, bringing that kind of revolution to the distribution of media in the home and conceivably corporate environments as well. They really simplified it."
Thordarson said that ViewSonic has brought a television remote point and click simplicity as the interface to quickly access digital media. "I could give this to my father or my grandmother and within 30 seconds they are going to be clicking away doing stuff, and my grandmother is 94 years old," he said. "She never touched a computer but she could do this."
Thordarson said the new wireless products open up new consulting and services opportunities for VARs. "There is a real consulting and systems integration services opportunity for the channel," he said.
ViewSonic has gone to great lengths to differentiate its new products from competitive offerings already on the market, said Todd Greenberg, the director of wireless product management at ViewSonic, who joined the company five months ago from Microsoft, where he was lead product manager for Microsoft broadband networking. He said the new media adapter, for example, includes a high-end video processor that is able to automatically decode and detect video content to a display's native resolution.
Further, Greenberg said that the ViewSonic wireless media gateway has the ability to simultaneously display up to 10 Megabits per second of wireless video at a high quality video resolution. "We are taking this whole wireless media networking category and going further with it," Greenberg said.
Next year, ViewSonic will drive deeper into the value-added opportunities surrounding wireless with software aimed at the public display and digital signage business, Greenberg said.