Post-COVID Future Remains Bright At Danbury Videoconferencing Company

DANBURY, CT — If there is one business sector, other than pharmaceuticals, that will be sad to see the pandemic in the rearview mirror, it's teleconferencing.

Videoconferencing company Connex International is celebrating its 40th year in Danbury, and after four decades the future has not looked brighter.

"When, unfortunately, the world goes to hell in a handbasket, our business grows," Connex CEO Debora Volansky told Patch. Connex has been "fortunate to play such a vital role in helping major corporations and small mom and pop shops stay connected, no matter all the crazy in the world."

COVID-19 may have kept everyone inside for two-plus years, but that didn't keep businesspeople from keeping busy. As meetings became less impromptu and more online, the more the phones rang at Connex's Federal Road HQ.

"The majority before COVID were all in person, you'd go to a trade show, you'd go to a conference, and it was all in person. Enter COVID, and all of that became remote."

From loading docks to C-suites, workers who had never been on a conference call, let alone a video conference call, were suddenly ready for their closeup.

But rather than finding itself swatting away at teleconference upstarts all anxious for their slice of the growing pie, the venerable Danbury company's competition thinned during COVID.

"We're a little bit of an anomaly in the industry, because we really focus on that white glove high end," Volansky said. "We have conference calls with anywhere from one to 25,000 people attending."

As teleconferencing became a day-t0-day necessity for smaller businesses, apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams saw their dominance dwindle while the large players at both the high and low ends dropped out of consideration, or existence, Volansky said.

The company employs 15 people in Danbury, another 70 people in Florida and North Carolina, and also maintains a secondary operations center in Kansas. Even though her company's business is videoconferencing, the CEO said Connex had to wrestle with the "work from home/come into the office" debate the same as everybody else. In the end, they punted, as have so many.

"We have a hybrid workforce. People who really prefer to be in the office, can come to office. Some of our team members work better remotely? They work remotely. I think that's here to stay," Volansky said.

Although COVID gave videoconferencing a shot in the arm, Volansky sees a few speed bumps along the industry's trajectory.

The first she describes as "Zoom fatigue."

""You're on a video, you're front and center on camera the whole time. And you always have to be 'on.'"

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerbeg and other tech titans believe that all business interaction roads travel through cyberspace. Volansky, who joined Connex in 1988 as a part-time worker while she attended college in Danbury at Western Connecticut State University, doesn't buy it. Although she thinks "some people would enjoy that because then they don't have to worry about that bad haircut they got or what they're wearing," she's not seeing any demand from her Fortune 100 clientele to switch from live video to avatars.