Cisco’s Webcast Last Week

Last week’s Webcast from Cisco ^[1] was a little disappointing and the announcements made during it were slightly over shadowed by other events in the industry – surely not least the DailyDOOH exclusives, Ed

Cisco’s announcement of DMS 5.0 for example seemed to receive little acknowledgement within the industry. Beyond DigitalSignageToday ^[2] that picked it up we have seen little coverage elsewhere.

It’s a bit like “Scala to announce InfoChannel 5 Release 3 at InfoComm” ^[3] – who really cares? Whatever the ‘new features’ available – gradual software improvements from all the global / world leaders in digital signage software (and my don’t there seem to be a hell of a lot of them) are ten a penny and shouldn’t necessarily grab the headlines.

We took a few things away from the Cisco webcast…

• Thomas Wyatt, General Manager, Cisco’s Digital Media Systems Business Unit told us that they now had “600 customers in 18 months worldwide” and that they had 30% of the top 60 banks as customers and 100 educational customers.
• A brand new player; the media player 4400 designed for advanced ‘digital signage’ which now supports Flash 9 and some new codecs
• DMS 5.0 now has a new Enterprise TV module (on-screen programme guides, playlists etc.) Added to the already existing digital signage and desktop business video functions, this makes Cisco’s solution an incredibly well rounded solution – especially for larger corporates who will want one product / one solution that does everything you might need, which leads us onto…
• Jordan Millar, Director of Product Development at Cisco customer, Axa joined the Webcast from Paris and predictably then proceeded to tell us how wonderful Cisco were (we don’t dispute that it’s just so obvious what is going to be said).

  Axa was billed to us personally, before the WebCast, as a big Cisco DMS new customer but in fact it was far from that, being mainly internal ‘corporate’ digital signage and some ego-TV. Axa now have 80 DMS systems in spain – 50% of those in the traditional sense in lobbies and reception areas and the other 50% as video wall boards.

  Actually some of the video wall board uses were quite innovative – in one instance Axa have wall boards in their call centres playing their own TV adverts – often 5 minutes before they go on air (i.e. live on TV) – basically helping the call cenbtre staff with up to the minute informatuion about who may call in!!

  The Axa guy said that they were “replacing legacy PC based digital signage systems” and there were many advantages, one of which was “drawing less power” – therefore an environmental impact. He also mentioned that his organisation liked the systems because they were easier to setup than a PC