Thomas Philippart de Foy, Appspace

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT One of the things I noticed bombing around the two exhibit halls at InfoComm in June was how most of the digital signage software companies were located in one hall, and some of them not looking all that busy, while there were at least a couple of others in the other hall, and they were packed with people. One of those companies was Appspace, and it was clear to me why the company was there with a very prominent stand. They were with their people, so to speak. While Appspace may have started years ago as another digital signage CMS software option, it now refers to itself as a unified workplace experience platform. That's why it was nested in with a bunch of other tech companies that provide the kinds of technologies - like collaboration tools - that drive contemporary workplaces. The company started out small, but now has 450 staff, offices all over the planet, and about 40% of the Fortune 500 as customers. I had a chat with Chief Innovation Officer Thomas Philippart de Foy back in 2022, and I wanted to do a catch-up with him because I was intrigued by what the company is up to. I also wanted to know more about how Appspace products have steadily been stitched into the fabric of how a lot of companies communicate, and tied in with many or most of the core tools now used around modern workplaces. I also wanted to better understand the company's recent announcement of developing native support for its software within Microsoft's Teams. Lots of CMS software companies have tie-ins these days  with video conferencing tools, but Thomas explains in our chat how this is different. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Thomas, nice to chat again. We've done a podcast in the past, but for people who maybe don't know much about Appspace and didn't listen to the last one, the fools, could you give me a rundown of what Appspace is all about?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Hi Dave. Thanks for having me on this podcast again. Appspace has changed a lot over the last 15 or 20 years. It was a digital signage vendor company many years ago. We are now considering ourselves as more of a unified workplace experience platform, delivering a lot of services to large enterprise customers, whether it's digital signage, which is one of the communication channels that we have, or an app, an intranet, or a whole workplace management suite of products. So the company has changed. We have around 450 people globally with offices around the world and really focused on the enterprise market, although we do a lot in the education space as well. Around 200 of the Fortune 500 companies use Appspace today.  Where is the company based? Is it in Dallas?  Thomas Philippart de Foy: Well, originally, the company was based in Dallas. Today, a lot of the leadership team is based in Tampa, Florida. So, I would say there is probably a split of headquarters between Dallas and Tampa. Both offices are very important for us in the US.  In the early days, you can correct me, but I think a lot of the development was done in Malaysia, right? Thomas Philippart de Foy: Yes. We still have a very large product engineering organization in Malaysia. Our Chief Product Officer and co-founder, Stan Stephens is still based over there. So that hasn't changed, but obviously, we acquired a company in the US, The Marlin company, a few years back. So we have additional resources elsewhere in the US and then we acquired Beezy, which is an Intranet company out of Barcelona in Spain. So we now have a big dev team out of Barcelona and some dev people out of Porto in Portugal as well. I was at Infocomm recently and found my way over to the Central Hall. Most of the digital signage stuff was in the West Hall, but, if you could take a bus over to the Central Hall because of all the construction, I walked through there and saw the Appspace booth and saw it was very large and very, very busy. And you gu