Nimans enhances AV capabilities and partner enablement and support with opening of TechZone at Manchester HQ
Nimans has signalled its arrival as a significant player in the AV distribution market with the opening of a technology experience centre at its Manchester offices where partners and their customers can learn about the company’s growing AV portfolio and engage with its sector experts.
The opening of the Nimans TechZone follows recent distribution agreements with Viewsonic and Hikvision and the company’s success at the Technology Reseller Awards 2026, where it was voted AV Distributor of the Year and UC & Connectivity Distributor of the Year by the readers of Technology Reseller magazine and website.
The TechZone is a multi-purpose space, functioning as a showroom and live demo and training facility for Nimans’ growing portfolio of video and AV technologies, including commercial displays, LED walls, video conferencing systems and speakers/ headsets, as well as its telephony and CCTV security products.
Perhaps most importantly, it allows visitors to see how different technologies can work together in realistic business environments.
As Nimans Video Product Manager Matt Hargraves told Technology Reseller at the TechZone opening, the focus is very much on showing how different technologies and value-add services available from Nimans can be used together to create a complete solution.
“The Tech Zone is not so much about products as the possibilities we can open up for partners. We could sit someone down in this room and go ‘Look at these cameras, look at these screens’. But that’s not the point. The point is to bring in partners and their customers, ask the right questions and expand their horizons. Instead of a customer saying ‘I’d like a meeting bar or a screen this size’, we can ask them what they would like to achieve and then say ‘Here are the options, now let’s narrow them down to fit exactly what you want’.”
Value-add services
Hargraves adds that value-add services, including pre-sales consultancy, solution design, deployment, white-label fulfilment and digital integration, are an essential part of this more consultative approach. “A partner can bring in a blueprint and we’ll run through the full design of what works. We will say ‘Position your ceiling speakers here, here and here; you’ll need all your cables running to this corner; put a rack here’.
“We also do pre-provisioning of devices. After we’ve created the solution, we can configure and update devices, box up accessories and put everything into big boxes for our customer and label them ‘site 1/room 1’, ‘site 1/room 2’ etc., so that when their engineers turn up, they don’t have to spend three hours updating things and typing configs. They can start installing right away.”
Kelly Maynard, who was General Manager UC&C at Exertis until March when she joined Nimans as Divisional Manager AV, points out that pre-provisioning is also great for avoiding out-of-box failures. “How frustrating is it when you’ve organised an engineer to go to a site, they open the box and it’s dead-on-arrival,” she says. “We’re taking the hassle out of a lot of reseller pain points. That’s where we add our value.”
This, she suggests, allows partners, especially those with a background in comms, to diversify into AV at a speed that suits them, taking advantage of Nimans’ value-add services to gain confidence and technical expertise.
“A lot of customers start out dipping their toes in AV and initially rely on our installation services. Then, as they win more opportunities, they say ‘OK, now train us on this. We need to get x number of engineers trained up’. We handhold them until they’re confident enough to do it themselves. I think that’s where we set ourselves aside from the competition.”
Three rooms
The TechZone, which builds on and expands Nimans’ existing presentation/ meeting room and video demo space, consists of three light and airy rooms, kitted out with AV and meeting room technologies from key vendors such as Yealink, Viewsonic and Hikvision on the commercial display side and Yealink and Jabra on the audio and video side. These include:
- an 80-person presentation suite equipped with video conferencing technology, which also has space for refreshments and product displays;
- a demo/showroom devoted to meeting room technology, including room booking panels, control panels, video bars, meeting room boards and audio products (speakers and headphones); and
- a second, bigger demo/showroom featuring large commercial displays, including an ultra-wide (105in) model, an LED video wall – Nimans’ first LED wall installation – and a large boardroom table.
The TechZone has been created for face-to-face interactions, but, as Hargraves explains, it also includes video conferencing technology to support virtual meetings and remote participants.
“Before we created this space, over half our video demonstrations were virtual and that is something we’ll continue to support. We’ve tried to put the right products in the right areas, so that when we need to do something virtually, we have the right camera angles, the right microphone coverage to enable us to walk a remote participant around the space, demo specific products and do shootouts against different options.”
Customisable space
Hargraves adds that the rooms are easily customisable so that, while video, AV and associated accessories are the TechZone’s main focus, the space can quickly be adapted to highlight other Nimans technologies, including telephony and security products.
“If someone wants to see something like a Yeastar or Mitel phone system, we can quickly spin it up. The table in the big room has equipment built-in which enables us to connect desk phones and showcase cloud telephony very quickly. That sort of adaptation is what we’ll keep doing,” he says.
Maynard adds that adaptability matters because as well as using the TechZone to support its own partners, Nimans is encouraging vendor and reseller partners to make use of the space for their own purposes, whether that’s to demonstrate a solution to a customer or to hold a product launch, training session or customer event.
“Already today, one vendor has asked to use the space for their sales meeting. Because the space is so customisable they could bring in dozens of people for a sales meeting and then break out into technical sessions afterwards. Or a partner could hold an open day for customers in the TechZone, with different vendors dotted around. We can fit about 80 people in here.”
Statement of intent
Maynard, who describes this as ‘a very exciting time’ for the company, believes the TechZone will help Nimans to differentiate itself from other AV distributors that don’t have such facilities.
“Looking across the distribution landscape, there are a lot of broadliners that are quite happy to ‘stack it high’. That’s not how we want to position ourselves. One of the successes we’ve had in the video space is being able to work with customers, understand their requirements and put together a solution that fits their needs, instead of trying to shoehorn them into something that isn’t quite right. It’s really important to us that we’re able to work with customers in that way and not just sell a box…At the end of the day, we want to bring a customer on board and keep them sticky to Nimans.”
‘Really positive’ feedback from partners who attended the opening suggests that the Tech Zone is already having the desired effect – particularly amongst local partners and their customers who would previously have had to travel to vendor facilities in London to experience products first-hand and to discuss their needs with technology experts.
“One of the things that surprised me today is the distance people travelled to get here, with some coming from London and even further south,” explains Marketing Director Matt Smith. “To hear them saying they can’t wait to bring their customers here and the distance they are prepared to travel to do so shows how much they value what we are doing here.”
To book your visit to the Nimans TechZone, please complete the booking form at
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