The Journey to Building Enterprise-Ready Digital Signage
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.
Key Takeaways
- Alan Kay: 'People serious about software should make their own hardware'
- Full-stack enterprise solutions require hardware control
- Developed ScreenCloud OS and partnered with gaming PC manufacturer
- Station P1 Pro is now second-most popular device, growing exponentially
- ScreenCloud OS 3.0 will support even more hardware choices
Topics
- Product Development
- Hardware
- Engineering
- Enterprise Solutions
Transcript
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.