Nicolas Quesne, deputy CEO of VITEC, admits that he can’t sit still, which is why his favourite pastime is undertaking large-scale DIY projects, even during his holidays. At his family home in the countryside outside Paris, Quesne has rewired the electrics, installed smart home IoT systems, repainted all the walls and rebuilt the kitchen from scratch. When the family needed more space, he watched a few videos, hired a mini-digger and built a full extension with his own hands. It took a year rather than the professional estimate of two months and the kitchen was out of action for a fortnight, but his wife Estelle and the children joined in with the painting. “I could never stay still on the beach soaking up the sun. I’m the type of person that has to keep moving,” he explains.
With his restless energy, Quesne is now planning to install solar panels, complete with battery storage and a network controller. The passion for home improvements, he believes, reveals the same love of technology that drives him at work. “At heart, I am very much a technologist,” he says. “What that means is I like to open things up to understand how they work.”
NORTHERN LAD
Quesne was born in the North of France in Normandy, but the family later moved south to the Rhône Valley, where he went to secondary school. But he remains a “northerner” at heart. “I am definitely French, but I much prefer the North of Europe,” Quesne admits. “I like to understand things, so I often ask myself why do I like the North more? Why do I like Scotland more than the South of France? One of the main reasons is that the landscape is so much greener. In Normandy, I think both the countryside and the mentality are a lot closer to England than the Mediterranean parts of France.”
As a young man, Quesne’s technical leanings led him to engineering school at INSA Lyon. Graduating in 1998, he joined STMicroelectronics in Grenoble, working on semiconductors for televisions and witnessing the huge media transition from CRT to LCD and from analogue to digital TV. But the biggest revelation came from the long product development cycles. Realising it could take years for an idea to become a product on a shelf had a lifelong impact on his strategic thinking.
“My experience in the semiconductor industry has made me think three or four years ahead – what I call a forward-thinking mindset,” he says. “At the same time, technology is always evolving. Every two or three years, there is something new and nobody knows what’s coming. So I do my best to plan what will happen next year, but you also need to be agile, look at all the small signals in the market and listen to the customers”
LIFE-CHANGING DECISION
After Grenoble, Quesne moved to Paris, joining a series of companies focused on imaging technology. He worked on camera IP for smartphones at DxO, and then from 2015, moved into product management at GoPro, responsible for the long-term hardware, firmware, and cloud roadmap. The GoPro years required him to spend two weeks in California every month, which was tough on family life. Despite working for a consumer brand, Quesne also found himself distanced from end users.
He quit, and made a decision he describes as life changing – enrolling at France’s EDHEC Business School for an executive MBA. It was a big gamble as he had to jump off the corporate career ladder without a job to return to. “It was a strong and difficult decision,” Quesne says. “In both my career and in my personality, I like things to go smoothly. So if I have an ambition or an objective, I will take risks to get where I want to go.”
The MBA proved invaluable, but for reasons that surprised him. The greatest lessons about leadership came less from the training and more from informal talks with fellow students, especially the former senior army officers who were studying alongside the business executives. Their thinking impacted his entire career. “They were colonels, or even higher ranks in the armed forces – and there’s a similarity with managing people at a company. They would speak about the need to give people a vision of why you’re doing things. If people have that overall vision – whether in business or the army – they will understand how to do their jobs.”
By a stroke of good fortune, the MBA was also instrumental in shaping Quesne’s future career at VITEC. As part of the programme, he had to undertake an in-depth strategic business project. Having previously worked with Philippe Wetzel, VITEC’s founder, he asked if he could use the company as his case study. Wetzel agreed, giving Quesne rare insight into company operations. Wetzel was impressed with Quesne’s analysis and offered him a job. “If you had asked me 20 years ago what position I would be in today? Absolutely not this. But here I am!” Quesne says.
TARGETED ACQUISITIONS
Quesne joined VITEC in 2018 as SVP of business integration, tasked with driving external growth through targeted acquisitions. In the years that followed, he led several major mergers and acquisitions that doubled revenues and grew the workforce from 220 to more than 350 people. The most significant early deal was the 2021 acquisition of Exterity, a Scottish company seen as a leading provider of IPTV, digital signage, and user engagement solutions.
It was a deal driven by geography as much as technology. VITEC was a French company generating the majority of its revenue in the US, and the Exterity acquisition gave it a footprint in the UK, Europe, and the Middle East. For Quesne, the connection to Scotland became highly personal, nurturing his preference for green, northern climes. During the integration process, his work demanded a full family relocation to Edinburgh for a year. “My wife stopped working and my three kids went to school there. And they all loved it! If you ask me, where is my second country? It is definitely Scotland.”
The subsequent Datapath acquisition reveals Quesne’s preference for playing the long game. Promoted to deputy CEO (directeur général adjoint) in October 2022, he was already in discussions with the Derby-based video wall and control room specialist while VITEC was still focused on integrating Exterity.
But rather than pursuing another major acquisition immediately, Quesne deliberately slowed down the process and approached Datapath with a different proposal. “I spoke with the leaders of Datapath and said, ’I see a long-term view. The challenge is I cannot integrate Datapath now, so my request is we wait for some time,” he says. “We were so busy with the integration of Exterity, I didn’t want to bother the VITEC teams with another acquisition.”
Datapath officially joined VITEC in late 2025, with 2026 marking the start of its full integration into the business. For Quesne, bringing Exterity and Datapath into the fold represents a long-term goal to evolve VITEC from a supplier of individual video hardware products into a provider of complete, end-to-end video solutions. “Before, we had excellent individual pieces of the puzzle – specialist video transmission here, digital signage there. Now, by combining VITEC’s IPTV and video streaming portfolio with Datapath’s expertise in video wall controllers, AVoIP, and control room technologies, we can walk into an enterprise corporate environment, a stadium, or a military command centre and provide the entire infrastructure. When our sales agents visit customers now, they expect these complete solutions.”
LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMATION
The evolution of VITEC has transformed not only its product portfolio, but also its leadership. Today, Quesne runs day-to-day operations as deputy CEO, while founder Philippe Wetzel focuses more on tech and innovation. It’s a far cry from a traditional corporate hierarchy. “When you found a company, it’s like your child; it’s your baby,” Quesne says. “On paper, Philippe is my boss because he’s president. In fact, he’s also below me because he’s CTO. It’s a unique organisation.”
Acquisitions have added to VITEC’s product portfolio, but the company is also keen to continue to innovate in-house. Around half of its workforce – over 200 people – are engineers working across silicon design, hardware, GPU technologies and software development. Unlike many competitors that assemble solutions using third-party technologies, VITEC develops its own core technologies. “We have everything,” Quesne says. “Some companies decide they will develop the software and buy the encoder or the set-top box. We like to own the technology because we think it’s more secure for our customers.”
Although his aim is to build a business resilient enough to withstand whatever comes next, Quesne admits uncertainty is the market’s greatest challenge. Geopolitical tensions, supply chain disruption and the emergence of AI have all made long-term planning more complex. “You have a vision of where you want to go, but then you have wars, AI, supply issues, price changes. Two weeks from now, you don’t know what will happen. That’s why uncertainty is our biggest challenge.”
AI FUTURE
But amid that uncertainty, Quesne sees areas where technology itself can help reshape the future. AI, in particular, is already becoming a practical tool across VITEC’s engineering teams, where it supports software development and workflows. In control room environments Quesne believes AI can help operators monitoring thousands of video streams by identifying the feeds that require immediate attention.
Quesne’s willingness to embrace the positive benefits of AI shows the insatiable strategic curiosity that drives everything he does, from rewiring houses to running VITEC. His philosophy will always be to solve the next problem, while never losing sight of the bigger picture. “As a leader, I need to adjust the tactics,” he says. “But the goal is always to maintain a strong vision.”
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