Installation and the AV Technology Awards is delighted to start announcing the rankings for the inaugural Pro AV Power 20 list. The brand new initiative celebrates the most influential individuals in our marketplace who are demonstrating leadership in areas such as innovation, market influence, commercial/business performance, contribution to good causes, education, professional development, diversity and inclusion, and general industry betterment.
The rankings will be announced weekly from today, with positions 15 to 11 unveiled on Friday 12th June and positions 10 to 6 on Friday 19th June. The top five positions will be announced during Awards Week: position 5 on Tuesday 22nd June; position 4 on Wednesday 23rd June; with the top three announced on Thursday June 25th. The person ranked number one will receive the Power 20 award for Most Influential Person of the Year.
You can read exclusive interviews with all of the Pro AV Power 20 members in a special ebook which will be released on Thursday 25th June.
We start our countdown today by unveiling those ranked in positions 20 to 16.
The Pro AV Power 20: positions 20 to 16
20: Carys Green, former director, Women in AV UK
Carys started in the AV industry in 2005 as an account manager at Maverick. “Since 2012, I have worked for integrators and I really love the variety of end users I have worked with from law firms to charities, global brands and primary schools,” she tells Installation.
“I’m an avid networker and have been involved with Women in AV since the early days of it being set up in the UK. When Abigail Brown so sadly passed away in November 2019 I was adamant I didn’t want all of her hard work and success to go to waste and was keen to ensure her legacy would live on by encouraging women to achieve more in the audiovisual industry.”
19: Paul Clark, SVP, EMEA managing director, Poly
Paul Clark is senior vice president, EMEA at Poly. In this role, Paul manages the company’s sales business, which spans voice, video, content, and cloud solutions, and leads the company in meeting the market need for easier, more consistent communication and collaboration experiences.
Clark has worked for Plantronics (now Poly) for nearly 25 years, holding the position of EMEA marketing director for the first 10 years, and then overseeing European product management before moving into various senior sales leadership roles. In early 2016, Clark was promoted to managing director of Plantronics Europe and Africa.
During his career at Poly, Clark launched the first reseller programme, took the company into the retail market, and was an early champion of the development of the wireless headset; a significant contributor to Plantronics’ business growth. Prior to joining Poly in 1994, Clark worked as product manager for Hitachi, where he was responsible for semiconductors for optical transmission systems. He has a degree in electrical and electronic engineering and has studied at Harvard Business School and Stanford University.
18: Tobias Lang, CEO, Lang AG
Tobias’s father, Paul D Lang, founded “Audiovision Paul D. Lang”, later to become Lang AG, in 1978. Tobias says, “I was born in 1975, my father founded the company in 1978, so I grew up with a direct connection to the AV industry. I can’t even remember a time without the AV marketplace.”
Tobias Lang joined the family business as an employee and supervisory board member in 2005, and has served as the company’s CEO since 2008 overseeing an expansion of the business into markets such as Switzerland, the UK, and Spain.
17: Andy Dyson, joint managing director, Saville Group
Andy Dyson has had a long career with audiovisual specialists Saville Group, having joined the company straight from school in 1988 to now co-owning it as joint managing director.
Dyson initially joined the conference and live events side of the business where he quickly rose to a senior management role in 2002. He headed up the systems integration side of the business in 2009, creating a new senior management team and driving a period of dramatic growth in revenue and profitability.
In 2013 Dyson was promoted to the board as commercial director and in 2015 took on a second role as sales and marketing director. In 2017 alongside six fellow Directors they successfully completed a management buy out of the company, and led and supervised the team responsible for the major company brand transformation in 2018. This saw the two operating sides of the business Sparq and Visavvi, emerge and develop as brands in their own right. A key focus over the last two years involved building a senior management team for Visavvi that has transformed this established UK business into a successful global entity that has seen international sales grow from £350K to over £4 million. Dyson has been a major influence in taking the Saville Group from £35 million to £45 million turnover during his time as a director.
16: Aidan Williams, CEO, Audinate
Aidan Williams is co-founder and CEO of Audinate. While at the National ICT Australia (NICTA), he was the driving force behind the digital audio networking project that developed the fundamental audio networking technology behind Dante. Prior to joining NICTA, Aidan was at Motorola Labs in Sydney where he worked on advanced networking technologies including zero-configuration IP networking, IPv6, reliable multicast, mobile ad-hoc networking and residential gateways.
He is an inventor on 20 patents related to IP networking. Williams participates in several standards bodies and industry alliances, including the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). In the IETF he has authored IETF documents on zero-configuration networking and the interaction between the IETF Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP), time synchronisation and QoS services. Before embarking on an R&D career, Williams developed extensive skills in networking, security, operating systems, and software development through several years of hands-on experience managing large networks, mission-critical systems and network security for a large university campus. Aidan has a BSc in Computer Science, and a BEng (Hons I) in Electrical Engineering, both from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), Australia.
Next Friday, we’ll continue our countdown to AV Technology Awards Week as we announce the Power 20 rankings from 15 to 11.
