Gerhard Pichler & Zuzana Yalcin, Easescreen

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT The roots of Austria's Easescreen are as a AV systems integrator, but when the company looked around in the late 1990s for software to use for jobs that weren't yet being called digital signage, there weren't many options. So Easescreen wrote its own software, and the company is now, by far, a software company first ... though it still offers hands-on solutions work in its home country Austria. Now Easescreen is looking beyond central Europe and actively developing partnerships and business in North America. I had a good chat with CEO Gerhard Pichler, and marketing manager Zuzana Yalcin, about the roots of Easescreen, how it differentiates itself from the many software options out there, and why they now have their sights set on this side of the Atlantic. Subscribe to this podcast: iTunes * Google Play * RSS TRANSCRIPT Gerhard and Zuzana, thank you for joining me. Gerhard, can you give me a background on what Easescreen is all about and how long you've been?  Gerhard Pichler: Sure, Dave. Easescreen started in the late 90s, so actually, my first company, which still exists, is an AV integrator, so we come from quite a strong technical background, and in some of the projects, the customer requested solutions, which we now call digital signage. So we started, more or less, as the second role on the market as a manufacturer of software, as I told you, more than 20 years ago and now this year, we have rolled out more than 10,000 projects in nearly 100 countries. So it developed quite well, I would say. Would you describe what you now do as being software-first? Or do you still operate as an integrator as well?  Gerhard Pichler: Software-first, but in our home country (Austria), we have two offices there, one in Graz, which is in the south of Austria, and the other in Vienna, the capital. So in this home market, we also do AV integration so we still keep our knowledge regarding network, transmissions, protocols, screens, and so on quite high. My team does this kind of job but definitely, the most important thing within the company is the digital signage of the Easescreen. I assume having that capability and current knowledge of the hardware market and the installation challenges and all those things is probably quite helpful in giving you insights as to what the end users and the resellers need versus just guessing and talking to people about it?  Gerhard Pichler: That's for sure. Especially one thing is the contact with the other manufacturers. So for our businesses, we have very close contact with two manufacturers: LG, and Samsung, and on the other hand, we know how the integrators, which actually are our customers with who we do indirect business, how their mindset is, what their pains are because we experience the same. So that's quite helpful.  I'm guessing that you got into the software side of this business, back in ‘99 because there weren't a whole bunch of software options out there at that point, right?  Gerhard Pichler: Yeah, you're right. There were some dinosaurs, like Scala or Omnivex in Europe but the options for the customers weren’t many compared to now. I would say in the 2000s and on, there were quite a lot of solutions coming up and disappearing again so it maybe was not very helpful for the signage industry because many of these solutions were not really professional, so the customer had a bad experience. They didn't touch signage for long, but I would say 10-15 years ago, it started again when customers trusted in professional solutions, and now the markets as you know as well, it's merging and there are a lot of solutions out there and there's some kind of consolidation going on. Of all those different deployments that you have, do you have some large ones?  I think I saw that recently you did some sort of a deal where you have, I think, roughly 8,000 displays for a tobacco company in stores in Germany. Is that correct?  Zuzana