DailyDOOH

Gail Chiasson, North American Editor

We spoke this past week to Raffi Vartian, recently promoted to the position of chief marketing officer at Signagelive, who is moving with his staff into new quarters at 8140 McCormick Blvd., Suite 132 in Skokie, Illinois.

It’s quite a move for Vartian who joined the company four years ago and originally worked out of his basement before setting up a small 700 sq. ft. office.

Now the company is moving into newly designed quarters that measure 2,400 sq. ft., giving the growing company a place to display a variety of Signagelive solutions.

“Moreover, it gives us a place where we can not only meet clients and potential clients, but allows us space to both work collaboratively and to grow,” Vartian said. “We will be hiring additional sales and marketing staff by the end of the year. That’s what we need here, since our software and other technology development is all done in the UK. Signagelive is a global provider of cloud-based media delivery solutions. If everything is in the cloud, that’s all we need.

“We want to really focus on our roles, but stay lean and mean, and grow exponentially. Our customers like to meet us, and now we have a place where we can really show what we can do. We have bar-height tables. It’s really designed to be a collaborative working space for both resellers and our hardware partners.

“Our new offices are about 10 minutes away from where we were in Evanston. And we are halfway between mid-town Chicago and O’Hare International Airport, so it’s really convenient.”

The new offices use mainly a blue and grey colour scheme that matches the company logo, along with touches of orange. There are 22’ high ceilings, with glass blocks high on the walls letting in lots of light. Design was handled by Weiss Properties.

“We wanted a place where people would be excited to come to work everyday,” said Vartian.

While furniture was still being delivered and moved around when we talked (and prior to an official opening reception planned for Sept. 22/15), most of the signage is up on the walls and working away. In the reception area, there’s a 2×2 55” video wall with three 40” portrait menu boards to its left and an 82” vertical portrait screen to its right. Scattered throughout, there are two 55” landscape displays, one 55” for video conferencing, three 48” landscape menu boards, and 16 10” and 22” room booking screens and other informational screens. They are all Samsung screens, and the majority are System-on-Chip (SoC) solutions.

“Since 2012 when Samsung first brought the System on Chip (SoC) to market, we have focused our efforts on moving away from the PC-dominated market and towards the open, HTML5-driven development environments,” said Vartian.

“While the HTML5 market started slowly for a number of reasons, Samsung’s constant SSP improvement, LG‘s introduction of WebOS and the highly-capable Google Chrome platform are all that our customers need or ask for.

“We always work with distributors, and we love the SoC screens. People can’t meddle with them. They are secure, working with the cloud. Applications for SoC screens are typically video playback, menu board and live TV with messaging. In fact, SoC screens are absolutely viable for about 70% of what’s needed on a daily basis in the digital signage world. That number will rise as we continue to build more and more intelligence into the cloud.

“We take a different approach to the market in that we really believe in partners. Some companies try to do everything themselves, but it’s difficult for one company to do everything well. So we capitalize on using partners. We can work with low ends and high ends. We are a partnership ecosystem.”

While Signagelive has been focusing on food service/QSR, retail, and internal/corporate markets, Vartian says that the company plans to start breaking into more verticals in about six months time.

Signagelive is a private company, founded in 1997 by Jason Cremins, CEO. In addition to its UK – handling the EMEA – and US offices, Signagelive has an office in Singapore supporting its Asian Pacific customers. The company operates globally in approximately 40 countries.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 13th, 2015 at 13:01 @584 and is filed under DailyDOOH Update. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.