Harris Corp. is the gold sponsor for this year’s Infocomm Digital Signage Pavilion, and is again sponsoring the show’s two-day digital signage conference — and the digital out-of-home solution provider sees InfoComm as an important opportunity to display its wares as well as educate its partners to help them grow their businesses.

"InfoComm is a tremendous opportunity as an educational platform," said Denise MacDonell, the general manager of Harris’ digital signage division. "In terms of InfoComm as a show for us, it’s definitely a very important show for Harris in the signage business as it gives us an opportunity to continually have a dialogue with our existing partners … to show them new capabilities or product releases and just to have ‘how’s it going?’ conversations with them."

The show provides Harris with a chance to show partners some of the untapped opportunities for digital signage deployments in new verticals, as well as ways to grow their existing business in more established verticals, MacDonell says.

But the show also offers a chance to present Harris’ products. Harris will be showcasing its flagship digital signage product, the InfoCaster lineup of components, as well as its Punctuate business management solution, which is unveiled at last year’s InfoComm.

InfoCaster is made up of basically four components, MacDonell says: A hardware player; a player software that plays content on the hardware; a network manager — basically the brains of the operation for monitoring the content and health of network and targeting specific environments; and a software called the InfoCaster Creation Station, used to create and design content for the digital signage network.

Punctuate, on the other hand, is more of a business-management solution, MacDonnell says. While Infocaster is a media player infrastructure with a monitoring infrastructure and a creative component built on top of it, "Punctuate is all about understanding how much available inventory do I have across my network that I could use for advertising or what we call billable time," she said.

Harris this year also will be showcasing some brand new hardware: a "very small form-factor" digital signage 500 box, a brand new dual-head 1100 box and a four-head 4100 box.

Also, this will mark the second year that Harris will be sponsoring the Digital Signage Showcase, an end-to-end view of how to take digital signage products into a specific venue — last year it was healthcare, this year it’s stadiums, arenas or live-event venues, MacDonell says:

"Were gong to further evangelize and expand upon what we’ve been doing in those areas of the business."