ISE 2025 Sixteen:Nine ISE Mixer Sponsor Profile: Screencloud

January 23, 2025 by Dave Haynes

It is just a few more sleeps before the 2025 edition of Integrated Systems Europe starts in Barcelona, with the digital signage community kicking things off on the eve of the giant trade show with a Sixteen:Nine networking mixer.

The sold out event – that took all of two hours – happens because of great sponsors who help cover the considerable costs of the evening, including tapas and an open bar.

As always, if you have registered but cannot make it because of changed plans, please let me know, as I have a waiting list of people who would love to come. If you are planning to just show up and sweet talk your way in, please don’t. Same with bringing plus ones or a full posse of your colleagues and friends.

I’d love to wave everyone in, but there is a hard cap on capacity and the food and bev arrangements are based on a fixed and capped number.

I like to thank and recognize sponsors by running company profiles, and next up is ScreenCloud out of the UK.

ScreenCloud’s approaching its 10th year this year – what’s your current mission and vision?

It’s definitely evolved over time. When we first launched in 2015 we were solving a problem that we had faced ourselves in our agency – hardware was established, but software and content were lagging with no simple way to share content to screens around the office. Since then the industry has made leaps and bounds and after solving the initial issue, we’ve honed in on key use cases, such as solving communication struggles with deskless and frontline workers. We’ve launched our own OS, prioritised security and today we’re dedicated to a dual goal of ensuring content quality and reliability. These are two of the fundamental issues many digital signage networks still face and you only have to look at my LinkedIn “error message of the week” series to see how many networks, in huge public-facing settings, are still failing on both fronts. The market offers endless software, hardware and content options, but without reliability and strong, quality content that’s fit for purpose, digital signage may be set up, but it simply isn’t an effective communication channel. 

As a company that started out doing software, you’ve since made your own OS and are now about to release your own hardware. What prompted you to make those leaps? 

As Alan Kay says, “People who are really serious about software, should make their own hardware” and we’ve seen that ring true for companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Meta. It’s a significant investment, and there’s far wider room for error when creating hardware, but we do know that controlling the full stack will enable us to create better performance and end-user experiences, which is key to our mission. It’ll also allow us to give our customers unique capabilities with features that don’t exist elsewhere, and of course having a proprietary ecosystem creates a lasting competitive advantage. We’re really excited about 2025 and what it’ll mean to bring this to market.  

Your customer base is quite interesting, in that you serve back-end use cases like Coca-Cola Consolidated, as well as customer-facing screens in restaurants and hotels. How does ScreenCloud serve both these areas?

Since 2020, we’ve been enterprise-ready, but we also realized that many customers have both internal communication and commercial use cases. Since a screen is a screen, if you have retail displays, you likely also have deskless employees needing communication. It’s led us to build a full-stack solution that serves deskless and frontline workers, corporate offices, and customer-facing areas in areas such as car dealerships, restaurants and so on. The goal is ubiquity – one powerful communication channel that’s both legible and reliable.

You’ve recently released a big campaign that focuses on an alter ego you’ve named “IT Hero”. Can you tell us the idea behind that?

IT is often the unsung hero of the workplace. And in our case, it’s usually IT that reaches out to ScreenCloud first, hunting for secure, scalable digital signage solutions. It’s IT that gets the system up and running, troubleshooting every hiccup with remote diagnostics. But it’s also IT that puts their trust and reputation on the line when they choose us. So, we wanted to take this opportunity to praise the IT Heroes who work tirelessly to support their colleagues worldwide. That’s not to say there aren’t going to be other superheroes in the ScreenCloud Universe(!), but we definitely wanted to recognize and show our support for the IT hero because we know them well and see their challenges.

What will ScreenCloud’s presence be at ISE 2025?

Previously at ISE, we’ve been supporting our partners, such as Ricoh and Google, and spoken to the Digital Signage Summit so this is the first year we’ll have our own booth. We’re excited to share IT Hero and the important message he represents to the industry. It’s lighthearted but it does reflect our true mission which is to enable digital signage networks, at scale, that are reliable yet simple to deploy, secure, on a choice of hardware, with quality content. ScreenCloud is also a finalist in the Digital Signage Awards, and of course, a sponsor at the 16:9 pre-awards mixer! Then plenty of our team will be present at the show to meet customers and partners, and enjoy content on the latest industry and hardware trends.  

The ISE 2025 Mixer Sponsors are …