26 INT ERVIEW
• Above Koy is a frequent traveller.
others he is quick to cite would be Paul Hartley at TMB and the late Jimmy Page from Syncrolite. “Every day is a learning curve for me,” Koy said. “I learnt from Steve how important it was to listen to users and how to develop relationships and network people together. “As for Jimmy, I was fortunate enough to share a hire car in 2005 from Bergamo to [the SIB Show] in Rimini. I learnt from him to do everything with a smile and transparency. His attitude to life is amazing, plus his Texan driving skills were put to the test in Rimini where we nearly ran over two locals. As for Paul, he is such a workhorse, and so honourable. You only hear good things about Paul and if I can have a fraction of that when I am his age then I have achieved a lot.” With such role models to look up to, Koy has managed to plough a similar furrow. “I am always trying to better myself every day and I hope people think of me as a positive guy, always smiling and transparent. We all want to leave a mark and I want to be the person that people enjoy doing business with. You can’t get it right all the time but make sure you don’t repeat your mistakes or the mistakes of others” Koy could scarcely have envisaged he would be in this position when the family left their native Sri Lanka in 1979 when he was just three. They could see the Civil War brewing and, following the Colombo riots in 1981, an estimated 100,000140,000 people were killed between 1982 and 2009. Koy was heavily involved in the protests in Parliament Square in the
final months of the war where he echoed the voices of thousands trying to educate the world to the indiscriminate bombings that were taking place by the Sri Lankan government. The Neminathan family set up home in north-west London where Koy has remained all his life and, today, still lives in Pinner with his wife Susie and three children. “I went back to Sri Lanka for the first time in 1988, and having only had Margate and Brighton to compare [the beaches] with, I found it beautiful. In fact, I’d like to come back here when I’m 50 and set up an eco-friendly B&B, and let the locals run it.” This sense of resilience, and the strength needed to prosper outside his homeland, equipped him with perfect qualities to take on the exigencies of Avolites. He sensed that Avolites had to break the perception that the outside world “only saw us as a bunch of party guys who made good lighting consoles.” He went on: “We needed to step up our game and prove that we could produce professional products that could compete at a higher level.” Breaking the mould had been a tough call. But, as the industry started to emerge from the straitened times of recession, Avolites played another masterstroke. Sensing a growing convergence between lighting and video they purchased the IP from media server company, Immersive (the former Pixel Addicts), run by Dave Green, John Munro, Mark Calvert and Ralph Lambert, in June 2011. They rebranded the Addict media software as www.mondodr.com
‘Ai’ and formed a spin-off company called Avolites Media. The new operation was put instantly on the map when Ai servers performed video mapping across the audience seats all 70,500 3 x 3 LED panels at the London Olympics Closing Ceremony, with the hardware control solutions developed specifically for the Ai product. After controlling “the world’s largest landscape video display”, Ai went on to control the unique “volumetric LED display” at the Sochi Winter Olympics. They couldn’t have wished for a higher profile launch. “That’s when it started to get really exciting for us,” he exclaimed. “It changed the game for us, because now we saw the future as visual integration.” The purchase of Ai, had always been with a long-term view to future integration, he said. In fact the disciplines of lighting and video had been converging for years. “Being experienced in lighting but new to video, we saw integration between the two as the ultimate goal; it was simpler controlling everything from one platform on a tour such as The Script (with Mirrad), running video and the lights and having it look as one. We are making the integration between the two elements seamless. We are not necessarily forcing our users onto one specific control surface, but an array of products networked and backed-up to provide a rock solid platform operated by one user.” But assimilation of the Ai boffins with the Titan software team had been anything but straightforward. “Our goal had been to get both teams working together -