Cleverdis - Information Intelligence

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		Plan your 2008 budget: Overview of European and worldwide editions

San Jose, CA, USA; January 21st 2008: Today, Cisco Systems Digital Media Systems Emerging Technology Group already has more than 400 customers, even though the business unit was launched just over a year ago. At that time, with a new set of possibilities for digital communications in mind, Cisco introduced what they termed their “fully integrated Digital Media System” to business customers.
Thomas Wyatt and Richard Barnes – © photo: Cleverdis	San Jose, CA, USA – January 21st 2008: Given the importance of this initiative, and given the importance of the possible effects of Cisco’s implication in this market, Cleverdis Editor in Chief Richard Barnes made a recent visit to Cisco HQ in San Jose, California in order to meet with key members of their Digital Media Systems Business Unit. In a tour of the new “demo room”, demonstrations were made of the capabilities of Cisco’s new Digital Media Player (hardware) as well as their Digital Media Manager software. He asked Thomas Wyatt, General Manager of the Digital Media Systems Business Unit, to explain what the Digital Media System solution does and how it works... The Cisco Digital Media System is a comprehensive solution that integrates the creation, management, delivery, and access of rich digital media for relevant, direct communications anywhere, anytime—fully integrated with our network technologies. Products span the entire value chain, including two software encoders for media creation, a Web-based media manager that can manage the encoders and media assets, schedule delivery, and create playlists, a Web-based video portal which enables users to watch live and on-demand video, create customized playlists, and search for videos, and a media player that handles display of high-definition live and on-demand content across digital signs.
*... So it’s a lot more than just Digital Signage?* Yes. Our approach has been to provide an integrated suite of solutions that include digital signage as well as desktop video, to give customers the additional ability to broadcast video out to a web browser on a PC for executive communications or training, for example. The Digital Media System is one common platform in the form of the mini data center, but running multiple software applications on top so that we can offer customers digital signage, desktop video, interactive signage and a variety of other applications down the road that will help round out the portfolio for them, so they can just pick one solution versus trying to put a few together.

So you entered the market with a “system” solution, but now you are branching much more into content…

Yes… we have a services organization within Cisco that can help provide guidance to customers around content creation and content strategy. When we entered the market we were focused primarily on the product side, and now, one year later, we realize we also have to have a content service piece, where Cisco and our partners help customers with the more creative elements of digital signage and enable them to get started easily.

We think our value is the integrated solution not just across one digital signage solution, but also with desktop video, enterprise TV[consider using interactive signage?] and other network applications as well as the content services elements.
Video is an art, not a science, and a lot of the things we’re offering we have thought through over the past ten years doing video ourselves. We acquired Scientific Atlanta which brought a lot of great intellectual property around video distribution into the company. So when we think about video delivery over the network, Cisco historically understands networking, and digital signage and desktop video are just a natural extension to that. A lot of the intelligence that goes into the media players, the hardware video decoding that we do, a lot of the content distribution methodologies we use… they’re all things we can add value to, in addition to the traditional work flow applications that you see within digital media systems applications today.
So when we entered the market for digital signage we had already seen it go through two phases. The first phase was the DVD player not connected to the network running on an LCD. The second phase has been really where we believe the majority of other companies and vendors in the space are, which is a PC-based solution, some of which are networked, some of which aren’t. We decided to go in with a network-based media player approach, where we design a box from scratch… not just rework a PC, but take an embedded, hardened Linux appliance that’s specifically designed for 24/7 reliability and uptime, and build the basic elements of what you need to do – graphic rendering and video decoding – into the hardware, and just run the system software on top of that.
What we’re finding with a lot of our customers, if you go and talk to a CIO and you talk about deploying 500 or a thousand media players, they do not want to deploy that many PC’s… it is a maintenance issue. What they like a lot is our form factor. They like to have a small form factor appliance doing separate processing and rendering of video through a DSP, and all we do is write the software applications on top of it to do the workflow and all those pieces. So our approach has been to integrate it all into the network to try to make it easy for effective video delivery.

What are the main sectors where you are finding interest at the moment?

The banking sector is very interesting… where you have a high percentage of knowledge workers that work in front of a PC every day, but then in the branch, the tellers and the bankers themselves may not have interaction with a PC, so they can get content directly from digital signage. The system can be used for training or communication, in addition to marketing, promotions, and advertising for customers.

One of the biggest issues for companies embarking on new digital signage projects is how to estimate Return on Investment. Do you have any tools to help people here?

It’s interesting that you mention that because I’m presenting on that very topic on Monday at the National Retail Federation Show. That historically has been a challenge: the ROI models as well as the analytics (how many people are watching the screens, how long people are watching and so on). There are business models like the one I’ll be presenting next week that take into consideration a variety of inputs, depending on whether you’re a retailer or a bank or another type of organization, and then factor in what the potential value propositions are—whether it’s cost savings, increased revenue or customer satisfaction…you can tie all those things together through an ROI model.

But, I think that’s just one area. You can look at potential benefits, but once the project is funded and running, how do you measure success? That’s the other area to look at. What’s coming next from an industry perspective is how do we get more intelligent about tying digital signage into PoS systems, so you can understand if you actually got the sale because of what was advertised on the screen. Video analytic software is also starting to be added in, incorporating video surveillance into digital signage to better analyze who is watching and to capture demographic information.

One thing our customers respond to very positively is the fact that Cisco has a portfolio of video products. It’s not just one application… it includes video surveillance, desktop video, digital signage and Telepresence: a life-size virtual experience. These are all technologies that are on the roadmap and that Cisco is bringing to the table, and it’s interesting, because customers have to make an investment for video across their network. One application alone may not be compelling enough to make that investment, but when you start tying in a variety of applications, and they all start to work together and integrate in an efficient and effective way, the value proposition gets better and the intelligence of each application is improved.