Discover how ScreenCloud supports enterprise customers beyond just providing a product. Learn about the specialised teams that help implement, customise, and optimise enterprise solutions for maximum impact.

Maximising Value in Enterprise Rollouts

ScreenCloud's enterprise offering is broken down really into two parts. Firstly, obviously, the product, we have a product which is suitable for small projects, but also big enterprise rollouts. And that comes with all the enterprise functionality that you've come to expect. But I think maybe where this is more interesting is in how we service enterprise customers, because having an enterprise product is really only the start point. It's how you use it, implement it, and set it up, which really counts. We have account management teams, professional services teams, and solutions engineering teams who help our customers maximize the value from the product. And that can take many different forms, from project managing the rollout to many locations, to customizing what can and cannot be deployed, custom permissions, and even design and custom applications and integrations that sit on top. So that is really where we specialize in enterprise. And if you're looking to do an enterprise rollout, you know who to call.

Almost every large company we work with has tried digital signage before, but reliability remains the big issue. I heard of an IT engineer doing a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in. The huge ROI saving with modern cloud-based signage is remote management—troubleshooting from afar without sending already-busy IT teams on costly road trips.

Enhancing Communication with Reliable Digital Signage

Almost every large company that we work with at ScreenCloud has tried to use digital signage before or is currently using digital signage. Very, very few people have never put screens up and tried to use them to communicate. When we talk to IT managers and administrators, one of the big issues is reliability. Screens go in every single location, but IT tends to be quite centrally managed or in hubs and not necessarily on the ground everywhere. I heard one story of an IT engineer having to do a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in a little bit further. This is extremely costly, and sometimes it's done with contractors. And so a huge ROI saving when using modern cloud-based digital signage like ScreenCloud is in the reliability. The ability to remotely manage all of those devices, to know what's going on and to troubleshoot from afar and not have to send your IT team, who are already really far too busy and should be doing better things, out on the road just to push cables in and turn screens on and off.

Almost every large company we work with has tried digital signage before, but reliability is the recurring issue. I heard of an IT engineer doing a 400-mile round trip just to push an HDMI cable in further. The huge ROI saving with modern cloud-based digital signage is remote management—troubleshooting from afar without sending overstretched IT teams on the road.

Enhancing Reliability with Cloud-Based Digital Signage

Digital signage in large enterprises is run by surprisingly small teams—even in 100,000-person companies, just 5-10 people manage thousands of screens. We need to give them super admin powers. If they're managing hundreds of locations, they can't update screens one by one—they need to create perfect templates and roll them out at scale instantly.

Empowering Digital Signage Teams at Scale

So we know that digital signage is really run by a small team inside of even a very large enterprise company. And that team will be comprised of both members of the IT team who are running that network and rolling out all those screens and keeping them updated and patched and managed, and also the content team as well. Now, for both of those user groups, we need to give them super admin powers. If they've got thousands of screens and hundreds of locations, they just cannot run through a system updating each screen one by one. They need to be able to create their perfect example of content or security policies or whatever it might be, and then roll them out at the click of a button at scale. So giving them really that power status, which enables them to run the network at scale without being a huge burden. Now, we're constantly releasing features in our remote device management console and in our CMS to keep making this process easier and more secure. And it's a continual journey. So if you are a ScreenCloud customer, and you'd like to know more about that, and if you have any more feedback, please let us know in the comments below.

I share insights from a decade in digital signage about the surprising reality of corporate communications teams. Even in 100,000-person organisations, comms teams are typically just 5-7 people managing all channels. Understanding their resource constraints is crucial - we focus on content repurposing and automation to make digital signage effortless rather than another burden.

Streamlining Digital Signage in Large Organisations

So one of the observations that I've made working over the last decade in digital signage is that almost irregardless of how big a company is, the communications team is usually centralized and very small. I've very rarely seen a communications team bigger than, say, five, seven people. And they are responsible for all communication across every channel, all across the business. So they're usually very under-resourced. They don't often have design resource in-house. They may have agencies that they can use. And they're usually flat out, trying to put everything out from whatever the C-level is asking them to do to whatever else they need to do in their content calendar. And so I find that because digital signage is normally a new communication channel for them, that one of their fears is, oh, we're already so busy, can we actually take on this challenge as well, which is a really reasonable thing for them to be worried about. And so we go out of our way to show that, actually, we can repurpose a ton of the content they're already making and just try and make it as automated as possible for them. But yeah, sometimes 100,000-person company still has a comms team of only five. And we need to remember that as an industry when we're talking about screens that communicate.

I explain why we built our own hardware, inspired by Alan Kay's principle that serious software requires serious hardware. To create truly enterprise-ready digital signage, we developed ScreenCloud OS in 2019-2020, partnering with a Chinese manufacturer to flash it onto the Station P1 Pro. This vertical integration approach is now our second-most popular device and growing exponentially.

The Journey to Building Enterprise-Ready Digital Signage

My co-founder, Luke, the CTO of ScreenCloud, is a big fan of Alan Kay, who's the father of personal computing. And one of his famous quotes is, people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware. And now, most software developers have an allergic reaction to hardware when it comes up. But the reality is, if you're going to produce a digital signage platform that is really going to be enterprise-ready, scalable, and powerful all the way through the stack, that means you need to go down to the very lowest level, which means getting involved with hardware. Originally, we only worked with third parties, and we will always do that, because we want to give our customers full choice. But when it was clear that there weren't great options out there exactly for the kind of use case that we were prioritizing, we had to go and do it ourselves. So, back in 2019 and 2020, we did an R&D project which resulted in ScreenCloud OS, which we then ran on a piece of hardware called the Station P1 Pro, which was actually a gaming PC that was already very popular and being manufactured in China with a really wonderful manufacturer with a great relationship with them. And so, we then flashed our operating system onto that fantastic device at the factory level and then started to sell it ourselves. And it's now, rapidly, it's the second most popular device that runs on ScreenCloud. Given that that's relatively new, there's a huge exponential graph that it's going on, and I think probably, within a year or two, it'll probably be the most popular device that we have running. And with a new version of ScreenCloud OS 3.0 coming out this month, it opens up the possibility of working on an even greater variety of hardware, so we can give many more choices to our customers.