Exploring the unique challenges of security and network management in digital signage for large enterprises. Learn how to ensure secure and reliable deployment across multiple locations.

Overcoming Challenges in Digital Signage Management

Beyond the obvious checklist of enterprise requirements, any large company that is assessing a SaaS vendor is going to have a shopping list of requirements, which I don't think is worth really listing off here. The two big, unique challenges that they will face when they come to their digital signage platform is really around security, which is paramount because we have seen many examples of screens being hacked and this is an extremely public way of showing that hack. And secondly, in the scale and management of the rollout of that network and then the ongoing management of that network. If you consider how many locations, how many countries and how many potential screens might just be in one building, it's massive. In order for that IT undertaking to happen, you need to have a really, really strong management platform and processes in place, not only to make it secure, but to make it reliable and work well and actually serve the business needs of which there will be many internally. Thank you.

Discover ScreenCloud's top integrations with Microsoft products, SaaS partners like Unilever and Awardco, and the innovative Broadcast streaming solution. Learn how these integrations enhance enterprise communication and engagement.

Top Three ScreenCloud Integrations You Should Know

So my top three integrations at ScreenCloud. In number one, it's our extensive and deep integration into all of those popular Microsoft products that every enterprise customer uses. At number two, I'm really proud of the sophisticated level of integration we've done with our SaaS partners. First up, Unilever and Awardco, providing a load of value to their customers and getting their wonderful content up on screen. And then the third one is a personal favorite. I love Broadcast. This is a streaming solution that allows customers to do town halls and push their message out live, especially to their deskless and frontline workers who rarely get to see these meetings. I don't think this gets used enough, so if you're interested, check out Broadcast. I think it's fantastic. For more information on all of these integrations and more, please go to ScreenCloud.com.

Explore how trust and understanding customer pain points are crucial in the deployment of digital signage solutions. Dive into the importance of IT collaboration and delivering real business value in B2B SaaS environments.

Building Trust in Digital Signage Solutions

I think specific to digital signages is you have to very, very quickly build trust with the customer. IT is normally the team that we're initially working the most with, because ultimately the screens are on the network, and if it's on the network, it's the responsibility of IT. Now, if IT get on a call with you, and they don't think that you anticipate the needs and problems they're going to have, they're not going to trust you, in which case they're not going to back you and roll you out, right? So you have to build that relationship really carefully and deliberately from the very beginning. And normally that's just about anticipating the issues and the fears that they're going to have, because what they don't want is screens go down all the time. You go to the airport, you see black screens, blue screen of death, all that stuff. That's IT's worst nightmare, so you've got to really understand that pain, acknowledge it, and then show how you're going to work to alleviate that pain and minimize the risk in the future, because they don't want to be the person responsible for rolling out something that's a massive headache in a year's time. So I think trust is key. And then honestly, it's just really, it's kind of simple. You've just got to listen, got to listen to what they want. You don't necessarily have to do everything they say, but you've got to really kind of like focus on the pain. We don't want to be selling just like aspirin here. We want to be sending proper painkillers like, oh, I've got a little bit of a problem over here. Fine. I want to be solving major, major issues, right? Because otherwise it's so easy for SaaS products to fall into like a nice to have category. And especially in like a market like we're in now, no one's buying nice to have products, right? They're buying products which are going to deliver business value back to them. So you've got to really hook into that pain and figure out what you can do uniquely to help solve it. And I kind of 

Explore how top SaaS companies achieve rapid growth through strategic planning and innovation. Learn about the 'core and explore' approach to product development and the importance of anticipating market trends to maintain a competitive edge.

Mastering SaaS Growth with Strategic Product Development

like the very best SaaS companies, when they kind of start to generate revenue, they do the triple, triple, double, double, right? Tripling in revenue annually, tripling, and then doubling and doubling. That is kind of like, that's like the gold standard for doing SaaS really, really well. And we were on that trajectory pre-COVID. But we actually took the bold decision is whilst we were even tripling in size, to actually start rebuilding our whole platform to anticipate the needs of enterprise, knowing that probably the defensive moat around the SMB was going to end up being a race to the bottom on price once they caught up a bit. So we kind of got ahead of ourselves. And thankfully, we did do that. Product market fit is almost like, it's not like a single thing. It's like you have it for a period, and then you've got to almost like anticipate what it's going to be again. So you've got to both catch current product market fit, but you've also got to have one eye down the road for like, what are the trends that are coming? And I call it, I call this thing core and explore, right? And it's how we generate, generally divide our kind of design and development product resources, basically. So 80% goes on core, which is like what you're building now, your roadmap, and 20% goes on these experimental down the road ideas. And right now, one of our biggest products, which is our own operating system for screens itself, it was an explore idea for a first year for one year, just with a couple of developers on it, just working out the viability and testing it a bit with some customers. That's now one of our core. So it does move, explore moves into core, doesn't always do that. We've had other things which have kind of been dropped and not developed further.

The CEO's role evolves significantly from 5 million to 20 million ARR. You shift from hands-on leadership to guiding a fully developed leadership team. You'll likely move upstream to bigger customers and contracts, requiring expanded support teams. And you'll need robust data and reporting systems to replace the organic understanding you had when directly involved in everything.

Evolving CEO Role from 5M to 20M ARR in B2B SaaS

So, on the journey from 5 million to 20 million ARR, I think the role of the CEO evolves in multiple ways, but the three that come to mind would be, firstly, how hands-on you are. At 5 million, you're still going to be very much in the trenches. You'll be building out the start of your leadership team, but you're probably still very much being the main leader and coach. At 20 million, you really need to have your leadership team fleshed out, and you're working mostly with them rather than with the people who are working inside of those teams. Secondly, if it's B2B SaaS, mostly I imagine you'll be going into bigger customers and bigger contracts. If you're doing small contract values at 5 million, you need to do a lot more of them to be keeping your growth rate going at 20 million. So, it's much easier if you can attract bigger customers and be selling more to those customers than just doing a massive number of customers. Not everyone follows that path, but generally speaking, most of us will probably go upstream, and that has a load of other elements to it, not just the product improving for enterprise and being more applicable to enterprise, but you also have to build out success teams, finance teams, even have more legal support, et cetera, to do that. And the third one would be numbers. At 5 million, you don't really need that extensive reporting. You need to be on top of your numbers so that you know what's going on. But you probably don't have a RevOps team necessarily really going at that point. By 20 million, you need to have data and reporting extensively to give you what previously you would have understood everything a bit more organically because you were involved in most of those things. When you're less involved at the day-to-day level, the data and reporting helps you to identify what isn't and isn't working well. And if you haven't got a good handle on that, a data lake and a good reporting system, you're going to struggle.

We're giving enterprises the option to disable AI features we've just launched. Most IT teams haven't finalised their AI policies yet, and their existing vendor contracts don't include AI terms. Whilst software will inevitably embrace AI more fully in future, right now businesses need time to update their thinking and renegotiate agreements.

Managing AI Features in Enterprise SaaS Products

So, you'd probably be surprised to hear that we are turning off AI features that we've just launched into the product. Well, we're not really turning them off for everyone. We're giving the option to turn them off. Most enterprise IT teams have not figured out their AI policy yet. And therefore, they've been through security reviews and vendor reviews with their existing SaaS partners, such as ScreenCloud, but that didn't include AI terms in those contracts. So, most of them have asked us for a toggle feature where they can remove the AI feature for now whilst they update their policies and renegotiate those master service agreements. So, that's something we're very happy to do. I think there will be a point in the future where it won't be possible to turn off every AI feature because I think software has to embrace these new ways of working and the benefits just way outweigh the negatives. However, now is not the time. I think this will probably come in maybe two years, depending, things are moving fairly quickly, but businesses will need to update their thinking around AI. But for the moment, it's come too soon, too quickly for them, and we totally understand that.

I explain how ScreenCloud partners with employee communication platforms rather than competing with them. We extend their content to digital screens, reaching deskless and frontline workers who lack access to email and apps. By 'second-lifing' content and using QR codes to drive engagement, we amplify the reach and effectiveness of existing communication tools.

Enhancing Communication with Digital Signage

Does ScreenCloud compete with employee communication platforms? The answer is no. We partner with them. They're producing content and pushing out to digital channels like email and employee apps, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. We add the digital signage component to that platform. So we're taking feeds of it, and we're pushing it up to screen so everyone can see it, like those deskless and frontline workers who might not have access to those other channels. But we're also second-lifing that content, giving it more exposure so people are understanding that message, and then we're driving traffic back into those products via QR codes so people can consume the whole thing. So we're very much a partner and definitely not a competitor.

I explain why Wi-Fi connectivity for digital signage is notoriously unreliable and how ScreenCloud solves this. Screens mounted on walls create signal interference, so we run content locally on each device and sync updates when connectivity allows.

Effective Digital Signage Solutions Without Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is everywhere, right? Wrong. Although we might be able to connect most screens to a Wi-Fi network, the quality of that connection tends to be very patchy or quite poor. Screens tend to go on walls or pillars, and the computers running those screens are then behind them. So there's a lot of interference to that signal. But the screens need to work. We cannot have blank or error screens. So we run all of the content on ScreenCloud locally on each device. Fairly simple if that's just images and videos, but more complicated when it's a web-powered product. That runs locally on the computer, and then we just take updates over the web when that Wi-Fi is working again, if it ever does.