Kuntz new president at MicroTek

LAKE FOREST, Calif.--Steve Kuntz, vice president of sales and marketing since 2002, is now president of MicroTek Electronics, a wireless equipment manufacturer focusing on security surveillance. The announcement came Nov. 1. Kuntz came to MicroTek from Gyyr, a surveillance manufacturer, to help the company grow from its position as a trusted OEM into a brand known in the security industry for its own products. He said he has focused on promoting MicroTek through national distribution and large integrators, resulting in roughly 18,000 units sold since 2003. Going forward, he has a goal of doubling that number to 36,000 units sold over the next three years. "We're a company that looks at what's available from a technology standpoint, and we work to apply that to security applications and solutions," Kuntz said, "and to the extent that we can be successful doing that, we'll continue to gain business from the integrators and dealers out there." Operating in both the analog and digital worlds, MicroTek has optimized its wireless signals "almost like cable replacement technology, getting full resolution video" from point-to-point or point-to-multipoint. The company also makes supporting products, like analog-to-digital encoders and decoders, which puts their analog/digital sales mix right around 50/50. Kuntz said his biggest focus going forward is educating the market, preparing integrators and end users for what wireless can--and can't--accomplish. Already, he said, the market is much farther along than when he came onboard in 2003. "There were a lot of people who were burned and were very skeptical of wireless," he said. "We found that once we educated and trained them, and tried to show people how the product works and the pitfalls to watch out for, our success factor increased and we started to alleviate a lot of those concerns." The primary tool for beginning that education is the company web site, he said, which offers tutorials and help with system design. Further, he said MicroTek reps are eager to be very involved in project design, frequently asking for digital photos of potential sites, using Google mapping, and delivering demos "to see it in operation ahead of time as integrators are putting together their bids." Kuntz identified Trango, Verint and Videocomm as competitors with similar market approaches, along with giants like Cisco who are beginning to focus on the surveillance market, but claimed he rarely found himself bidding against another wireless company for a job. The focus is on education "to get into projects in the first place," he said. "The market is expanding at a rate that there's enough to go around out there."