Article

Cisco 'making a big bet' on digital signage

Networking giant talks about its appliance, marketing strategy.

March 22, 2007 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

Networking titan Cisco turned a lot of heads in December when it introduced a turnkey digital signage hardware and software solution, then purchased a digital signage startup within a matter of days.

The company's digital signage package is built around a small media player and a Web-based software tool for managing content. It integrates with Cisco's other network-driven services, such as telepresence and desktop video.

We spoke with Thomas Wyatt, director and general manager of Cisco's Digital Media Management division, about the company's value proposition for its new signage business, as well as the nuts and bolts of its media player and software.

DST: Tell me about Cisco's approach to digital signage, in a nutshell.

Wyatt: We see digital signage historically as being a very "point solution" — you've got a variety of software solutions out there, running on PCs, sometimes even DVD players. We said, digital media is really a platform for a variety of applications, among them digital signage.

(Our product is) designed for digital signage as well as desktop video. It does everything from encoding of content to content management, and we've got media distribution technology with our routing and networking services products. And then we've got the end products, which includes the media player that connects to a display.

Most of the customers that we're talking to are interested in creating content once and pushing it to multiple devices. With Cisco digital signage, it's fully integrated across the whole value chain. We also take into consideration the network itself. The IP network is becoming a great platform for video services.

If you take an example of retail or banking, it's all about improving the customer experience. The ability to get customers to buy higher margin products has been one of the big drivers. Studies show that 75 percent of all customer purchase decisions happen while they're in the store, but less than five percent of the marketing money is spent in the store. So there's a disconnect there.

DST: How does your media player differ from competitive products on the market?

Wyatt: If you look at the majority of the landscape in digital signage, it's primarily startup companies. They way they've attacked the business is to take a computer and put some software on it, then require a PC at every endpoint. And they kind of leave it up to their customers to figure out how to deliver it over the network.

Cisco's Digital Media Player

Our customers do not want to use a PC-based solution, because (PCs are not) designed for digital signage. They're designed for the knowledge worker to do office work; they're not designed for 24/7 up time.

(Our media player) is a very small appliance, and it weighs less than a pound — it's much smaller than a cable set-top box. This is a device that you can securely connect directly to an LCD and enclose it, and it's designed especially for the rendering of graphics.

DST: Tell me about your Digital Media Manager software. There's a lot of software out there to run a digital signage network – how does yours stand apart?

Wyatt: We've taken an approach where we want to do everything from be able to group media players and support on-screen zoning and support different roles and the ability to give permissions to publish to different screens. And we wanted the ability to use the same platform for digital signage and desktop video.

DST: From a technology standpoint, is there anything cutting-edge or groundbreaking under the hood?

Wyatt: It's one of the first in the market, if not the first, to do 1080p high-definition. It only consumes 7 watts of power — that's certainly an innovation. And it integrates with our Application Content Networking Services. That's very important when you're talking about any kind of video streaming. The network is a consideration. A lot of buyers are not willing to put digital signage out there unless they're sure it's not going to impact the existing network.

DST: What's your big-picture marketing strategy — what's the first group of people you're trying to reach with this?

Wyatt: There are quite a few vertical industries that have expressed interest. Our challenge right now is scaling and focusing, quite frankly. But if we look at financial services and retail, those are the markets that tend to have not only the biggest part of the addressable market but also the biggest need to move quickly.

We're making a big bet overall on enterprise video. We've introduced four new markets, all of which we believe have billion-dollar potential over the next five to seven years. Those are video surveillance, telepresence, desktop video and digital signage. Cisco is making a very big bet with this — as big a bet as we made with the acquisition of Scientific-Atlanta.

Over time, you're going to see us integrate technology from these other applications, into the digital signage offering to make it much more compelling for customers. So if they go with Cisco, they're going to get the benefit of interconnectivity with all these other Cisco products. We believe these will be our growth businesses. These will be the businesses that will grow Cisco's top line.

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