Volume 10, Issue 10.2 — October 29, 2018

rAVeDS — Volume 10, Issue 10.2 — October 29, 2018

October 29, 2018 | Volume: 10 | Issue: 10.2

Last week, I traveled up to New York for the 25th Anniversary of the NEC NY Showcase. The event itself was impressive — kudos to the events team at NEC. But what really caught my eye was the release of NEC ALP, an analytics platform to enhance the retail customer experience. You can read an article about that below or watch my interview with Rich Ventura of NEC here.

This week, our team heads to NY Digital Signage Week. I’m excited to see the cool work that the leading companies in the digital signage vertical are doing. Stay tuned for all of our coverage from New York on rAVePubs.com and on social!

It is a busy time of the year for digital signage but I’d recommend taking a couple of minutes to check out the news below — there is some good stuff.

-Jacob Blount

COLUMNS

+ The Vertical Market Customer Buying Journey [Anthony Coppedge]

Helping prospects and clients inform themselves during their customer buying journey is not a one-size-fits-most process due to the exponential growth of online search. Instead of manufacturers and systems integrators publishing generic product features, benefits and specifications, today’s influencers and decision-makers are searching for how products work in their unique vertical markets and applications. To land high in search results, AV industry vendors must create unique vertical market customer buying journey maps to position well in relevant search results.

+ Scheduling, Software as a Service and the Day I Sat Through the Same Presentation Four Times [Leonard Suskin]

I don’t know if "As a Service" has replaced "experience" or "convergence" in the AV buzzword bingo game, but it certainly has been a hot topic as of late, opening some interesting questions as to how the business models of traditionally hardware-centric AV companies fit into a software — and software as service — based world. Last week, I met with Crestron Electronics, often seen (perhaps erroneously) as a hardware company. What was interesting about this is that it was neither a hardware-based day nor particularly a Crestron-based day; the heart of the gathering was a series of presentations by Crestron’s software partners in the world of room scheduling. Overall, both the event and the partnerships say something about one of the ways in which Crestron sees their role in an increasingly software-based world.