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Profile: Marcel LeBrun

Oct 22, 2001  •  Post A Comment

Title: President and CEO of iMagicTV, a provider of software products and related services that enable telephone companies and other service providers to deliver multichannel digital television and interactive media services to their subscribers over a broadband network infrastructure. The company is based in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada.
Background: Prior to co-founding iMagicTV in November 1997, Mr. LeBrun was managing director of electronic commerce at NBTel.
Benefits: “iMagic pioneered this space. That means we’re the furthest along. There are other competitors who’ve come online with software products like us, but they haven’t had successful deployments. So there are all kinds of little bugs, features and software capabilities that we’ve developed over the last three years that competitors have a ways to catch up to. And telcos in particular want to go with the proven solution. They don’t want to take a risk, because there’s enough risk in introducing a new service to begin with-why add risk upon risk and go with something unproven?”
Projects: “Our most recent customer announcement was around our design win with SingaporeTel, which was a few months after we launched our business in Singapore. SingTel is a very watched telco in Asia in terms of what they do and how they do it. So we’re very happy about that design win.”
Challenges: “The one we eat and breathe is the timing of the development of this market. And the most significant influencing factor around that is the current economic climate. It is just brutal out there from that perspective.”
Future: “You need to exercise leadership within your circle of influence. So iMagic is going to be active. We’re not just going to sit around and hope for the market to unlock. We’re always exploring our strategic options to try and accelerate the unlocking of this market and increase our competitive differentiation against others. … There is a competitive battle going on-it’s battle for mind share, and it’s battle for leadership prior to the battle for market share. Because you can’t argue there’s a battle for market share until you have a large market. So right now it’s a battle for leadership, and we’re fighting that very aggressively.”