New Company, Next Generation Technologies
Not everything at I/ITSEC 2016 necessarily happens in the full light of day on the exhibition floor. In a darkened hotel suite next to the Orange County Convention Centre, a new, vibrant and active Norwegian company is bringing light to bear – literally – on the advantages of cutting-edge projector technologies for the simulation market.
Thoroughly Norwegian in origin, Norxe (pronounced Norse – think Thor, Odin and bearded warriors in horned helmets) was established just a year ago by eight co-founders, all of whom were formerly executives in Fredrikstad-based projectiondesign as. Followers of the simulation market will need no introduction to the design legacy left by that company – and will be familiar with its acquisition by Barco in 2013.
One of those founders, also the VP Global Sales, Espen Olsen, explained the motivation behind the establishment of Norxe. “Really it comes down to the partner network asking us to return to where we came from – to being small, agile, responsive and able to fully exploit new technology,” he confirmed to Mönch today. With legitimate claims to deep and intimate knowledge of the partner network serving the global simulation industry, Olsen and his colleagues have developed a flat management pyramid, retaining the agility and – more importantly – encouraging the will among the company’s growing staff to exploit the undoubted opportunities it faces.
Those opportunities will centre on the market for high end, technologically advanced projectors. That means not just military simulation and modelling applications, but “everything multi-channel,” in Olsen’s words. Mining, medical, law enforcement – any application in which precision and reliability are paramount for mission-critical deployment.
The P Series LED projectors being showcased at I/ITSEC this week are solid-state, next-generation units, whose characteristics have been well regarded by the teams of customer and systems integrators’ representatives entering the Norxe suite, according to Olsen. An LED solution at a time when the rest of the industry is focusing efforts in laser-phosphor may seem counterintuitive. As Olsen explains, however, it is a deliberate decision by Norxe, bearing in mind that advances in the LED world have taken the technology giant strides further forward in recent years. “It’s about knowing your place in the food chain – we rely on good partners and we all know that the technology is always moving ahead, so focusing on a discipline we have mastered, in which we can excel, and for which customer demand is growing seems like the right thing to do,” he told Mönch.
There is a lot more to tell, because Norxe has a fascinating unfolding story to tell. But that will be for telling at a later date. Meanwhile it will be instructive to watch how Olsen and his colleagues exploit the unfolding opportunity. “I guess as a small company it is easier to run alone in front of the pack,” he observed.
