EPISODE 34 | Guest: Joe Murray, systems engineer, Visix, Inc.
Though the purpose and goals of digital signage might seem a bit abstract – things like engagement and return on involvement – at its heart, it’s a technology. That means screens, cables, wires, computers and other hardware. So, it’s important to understand networking basics.
Each deployment will be different, depending on a number of specifics to the physical infrastructure, internet access and security considerations. But there are some things that can apply to almost all deployments:
- Explore the differences between cloud-hosted and on-premise systems
- Understand basic networking essentials before deployment
- Look at the specific network requirements for a Visix system
- Learn how even secure facilities can take advantage of digital signage
- Think about security issues
- Don’t forget bandwidth considerations
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Learn more about this topic in our Masterclass Guide 1: Digital Signage Systems Overview and the AxisTV Signage Suite Networking Guide
Transcript
Derek DeWitt: You know, we talk a lot on this podcast about sort of general ideas for business communications, essentially both public facing and internal communications. Mainly how you can use digital signage for that. But we kind of take this more sort of abstracted, two stages out from the ground level view of things. But it is a technology and it is technology based, and there are things like screens and wires and whatnot. And one of the things you have to think about is networking. I don’t really know that much about that, but thank God I’m here with somebody who does. And that is Joe Murray, systems engineer and architect for Visix. Hello, Joe.
Joe Murray: Hey Derek. How’s it going?
Derek DeWitt: Great. So, I’m hoping you can educate me a little bit, and some of our audience members, on some of the networking considerations for digital signage.
Joe Murray: Absolutely. I Iove tech! Some might say that’s why I work here and have my job. I love tech. So…
Derek DeWitt: Well, then that works out quite nicely.
Joe Murray: More than happy to talk to you about it.
Derek DeWitt: Do what you love and what you love will love you.
Joe Murray: Is that what they say?
Derek DeWitt: No, but it’s my new hashtag.
Joe Murray: Cool!
Derek DeWitt: I’d like to thank Joe for talking to me today and I’d like to thank all of you for listening.
I know networking, to a certain extent, in my consumer life. Like you know, at Christmas I’m the guy that does the lights on the tree. I’m super particular about how they’re done. And just for the record, it’s small, colored, blinky strings.
Joe Murray: You’re a pro.
Derek DeWitt: I’m a pro! One wrapped around the trunk and then the others branching out in, in discrete sections.
Joe Murray: You painted a beautiful picture there.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Yeah. And, obviously, you know, you’re setting up your computer and your WiFi and stuff at home. I know how to do all that stuff. How much different is networking in a digital signage context?
Joe Murray: Well, a lot of it depends, right from the gate, is your system hosted, you know, in the cloud through us or is it going to be on premise? Because that changes basically every networking requirement.
Derek DeWitt: Gotcha! All right, so not a decision to be taken lightly?
Joe Murray: No. Yeah, this is something you want to think through. This is something you want to have planned well before we work with you and implement things. I will say there has certainly been a trend of customers going to our cloud offering, our hosted offering.
Derek DeWitt: It’s just kind of becoming the thing now, I think.
Joe Murray: Yeah, I would say it’s not just us, of course. It’s certainly an industry-wide thing. You know, people are moving towards not having their own hardware on premise. They’re moving to, “Hey, you guys host it and do maintenance in the cloud” and subscription-based stuff. I mean, basically as a whole, the whole tech industry has gone into subscription stuff. And you know, we’ll take care of all the hard technical stuff for you; you just deal with the content, the end stuff.
Derek DeWitt: Right. And I just want to consume it.
Joe Murray: Yeah. Honestly that’s exactly it.
Derek DeWitt: I want to make the food; I just want to eat it.
Joe Murray: Right, just let me have it. So, I would say, we can talk about cloud-hosted stuff first.
Derek DeWitt: Okay. Is that more complicated or less?
Joe Murray: It depends on how secure your environment is. I would say for a regular customer, it’s not inherently more complex. In fact, you could certainly make the argument it’s less complex because you don’t have to deal with your own on-premise server. You know, we’ll take care of that for you.
So, that’s certainly less complex there, but you’ve got to make sure that you’ve got a solid and stable internet connection. Obviously, that’s a huge requirement because if you’re going to hit our server, you know, up here in the cloud, then you’d better have a pretty great internet connection. Especially if you’re going to be uploading videos, downloading videos to the players, things like that. That’s a pretty serious consideration.
So, I would say a solid internet; you want to make sure you’ve got that. Ideally, we’ll have some type of public IP address that will help make setup much easier. Although if you don’t have that, it’s not the end of the world; we can work around that, and we’re aware that a lot of customers don’t have that type of capability or don’t want to handle that.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, they think it’s insecure.
Joe Murray: Yeah, it’s a whole thing. You know, they have to get it from their internet provider, and they have to configure their internal firewall properly. So yeah, we definitely understand that not everyone’s going to supply us that. But you know, a public IP address.
And then with Signage Suite we have this new software component that we didn’t have in the older AxisTV 9 software, and it’s called a relay. Think of it basically as just a PC that sits on your network that, during initial setup, communicates with our cloud-hosted server so your players don’t have to. So, you’ve got all your Engage players. They’ll communicate directly with the relay, which is, you know, physically located at your site. And then it will communicate over the internet with our hosted server.
Derek DeWitt: Gotcha. Okay.
Joe Murray: And so, there is an additional component of the relay during setup. But yeah, if we’re hosting a cloud-based system for you, then you’re going to want the relay, preferably a public IP (but not the end of the world if you don’t), and then you’re going to want to make sure that you’ve got the proper ports open between the relay and our players. Because we don’t just use like port 80 or 443, like a lot of softwares do. We have our own proprietary ports we use to get content very quickly.
Derek DeWitt: And I should think this would be any cloud-hosted digital signage, somewhere.
Joe Murray: Absolutely.
Derek DeWitt: It really very much the same thing.
Joe Murray: Exactly. It’s not unique to us. Any enterprise-grade software is going to have enterprise-grade requirements, and that’s something to take note of. I think a lot of customers, I don’t want to say “forget that”, but you maybe aren’t used to that if this is their first sort of redundant, supposed-to be-on-all-the-time system that sort of operates itself.
You know, digital signage really works that way. It’s autonomous. It’s supposed to boot up by itself, start running content by itself. You can push upgrades. And so, I think a lot of customers sort of forget that, yeah, we’re going to have special requirements. The entire digital signage industry does because this is not like most other softwares and services you have at your organization.
So, we certainly have some more enterprise-grade requirements. But it’s to make sure that things work seamlessly, that we don’t interfere with other products on your network, and really just that everything just works well and consistently works well.
Derek DeWitt: Right. I mean, that’s the dream. Okay, so that’s cloud. How is an on-premise system or deployment different?
Joe Murray: So on-premise is different in that you actually, as the name implies, you have all the components on site. You know, actually at your organization. And so you…
Derek DeWitt: Right. It’s all there. Lock the door. Swallow the key. No one’s getting in.
Joe Murray: Exactly. No one’s ever getting to it. So, you know that a lot of customers, a lot of government customers, will say, “Oh, it’s gotta be on-prem.” Which is, you know, I totally get that. I used to work in in healthcare. I get that.
So, basically with an on-premise deployment, you have to provide your own server. You know, we’re Windows-based software, so have a Windows server. You will install our AxisTV Manage software on your server. And then, if you’ve bought hardware from us for the players, then it’ll already have Engage primed.
Derek DeWitt: If not, then you can stick it on there.
Joe Murray: Exactly. You’ve got to install Engage on your own hardware. And then the only internet access you need at that point is to activate our player licenses and our Manage licenses.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Beep! Whoom.
Joe Murray: Exactly. Very technical. Exactly! However, we do actually now have government licensing, which is for customers that, you know, just cannot have internet access for their internal systems. Which, you know, again, I can certainly understand where that’s coming from.
Derek DeWitt: We’re in a bunker 50 feet down.
Joe Murray: Honestly. Yeah, that’s it. We do not allow internet here.
Derek DeWitt: I work in an air-gapped facility.
Joe Murray: Yeah. That’s a thing. Yeah, absolutely.
Derek DeWitt: Doesn’t mean you can’t have nice digital signage.
Joe Murray: Absolutely. Actually, you bring up a good point. You don’t have to inherently have internet access to use our software and our services. However, you need to note that things like AccuWeather will not work.
Derek DeWitt: Right. You’re not going to get any kind of automated content feeds.
Joe Murray: Absolutely. You will have to manually take care of a lot of your content.
Derek DeWitt: Ha! You’re on your phone going “What’s the temperature tomorrow? Type it in! What’s the time? Type it in! What’s the time? Type it in!”
Joe Murray: I mean, I’m sure someone out there does it.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. One very overworked employee.
Joe Murray: Absolutely.
Derek DeWitt: So how does this stuff get activated then? I mean, is it like on a stick or something, like a thumb drive? You have to go, and someone has to physically plug it in and go, “Okay. It’s authenticated” and you can use it?
Joe Murray: The way government licensing works is, we build a version of AxisTV Signage Suite, let’s say version 1.30 in the future. When we make that installer, we’re going to make our regular installers for our regular customers. And you distribute those over the internet, customers install it, or we’ll install it for them; they just license it.
Derek DeWitt: Right. That’s how we do Adobe Creative Cloud and Office 365 and all that.
Joe Murray: Exactly. You’ve got your product key and everything.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, exactly.
Joe Murray: If you are a more secure customer and just do not allow internet access at all…
Derek DeWitt: Or just super-paranoid.
Joe Murray: Or super paranoid. You can use the government licensing. Basically, we build, you know, version 1.30 for you, let’s say on January 1st, just to make dates easy. We then allow that software to run for 13 months from the day that we built it and assembled it here.
Derek DeWitt: And then it needs renewal.
Joe Murray: Exactly. And then it will need a renewal. So, after 13 months…it will preserve all your content (it’s not going to delete everything)….
Derek DeWitt: Start over!
Joe Murray: Exactly, but it’s not going to play content. And it’s not going to allow you to log in to Manage.
Derek DeWitt: Gotcha. I understand.
Joe Murray: And so, to relicense it, you would actually install a newer version of Signage Suite that we’d built later.
Derek DeWitt: It’s actually kind of a smart way to make sure that people have a more up-to-date version. ‘Cause you know, I know that there are some clients (we’re not naming names) but even before Signage Suite came out and it was just AxisTV (I mean the last iteration that was 9) and there were people who were still on 4.
Joe Murray: Yes. Oh my gosh.
Derek DeWitt: And then they would say, “You know, it just doesn’t work the way it used to.” “Huh! It doesn’t, huh? Well, that’s a shocker! How odd that five iterations, full iterations, of the software later, it’s not working so well.”
Joe Murray: We changed a few things here and there.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. Just to say. We didn’t just change colors, you know.
Joe Murray: Right.
Derek DeWitt: Well, you know, I read a stat the other day (maybe you know the answer to this, maybe you don’t), without an update, what’s the average life of an app that you stick on your smartphone?
Joe Murray: Oh, on your smartphone? Gosh.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. You stick it on your smartphone…
Joe Murray: Oh, it can’t be long. I’m going to say maybe a year.
Derek DeWitt: 30 days.
Joe Murray: Wow! That’s hilarious.
Derek DeWitt: 30 days. In 30 days, if you have updates turned off, it will begin to misbehave.
Joe Murray: Yeah, I can believe that. Especially if you have, let’s say like the Facebook app or something; they’re changing API calls.
Derek DeWitt: Which I hate. I’m on record as saying I hate the Facebook app.
Joe Murray: Oh, so brave! So brave.
Derek DeWitt: I hate it, hate it, hate it.
Joe Murray: But yeah.
Derek DeWitt: Fix it!
Joe Murray: Never.
Derek DeWitt: Please!
Joe Murray: I can see something like that, something really complex, just, you know, not working after 30 days.
Derek DeWitt: Sorry. But we’re all done with you. So, yeah, that’s pretty interesting. I guess you had to come up with that kind of a system because (back to the government thing,) because yeah, there are these clients who are like, “Hey, we want this. We’d love to have it. It’s what we’re looking for. But we have these externally imposed rules and there’s really not much we can do about that.”
Joe Murray: Right. And I’m sure any IT experts listening to this will completely agree with me when I say you can leave computers unpatched and you can leave them vulnerable and everything. If they’re not on the internet, they might be okay. I’m sure we have some customers here running, like, Windows XP still.
Derek DeWitt: Ho, ho, ho, who are you people? XP, ha, ha, ha.
Joe Murray: I mean, if you’re not on the internet, it technically is not a security vulnerability.
Derek DeWitt: Yup, that’s true.
Joe Murray: Especially if you have the computer itself in a very secured area, then it’s fine. I’ve heard rumors of banks still running, like, Windows NT 4. As long as they’re just not on the internet, and only certain employees have access to them, then it’s fine. It still works.
So, we really built the government licensing specifically for customers that, you know, like banks, like governments, like even some more secure colleges that just say “Listen, we have the most secure environment and that means no internet.” I get that.
Derek DeWitt: Okay. No problem. Active Directory was the state of the art of thing, way back when.
Joe Murray: The future.
Derek DeWitt: It was the future. And now it’s becoming the past. Right?
Joe Murray: Sort of. So, there’s definitely sticklers to Active Directory (AD Integration) to this day… And, you know, I used to be an AD admin. I totally get it.
Derek DeWitt: And just real quick, for those that don’t know what Active Directory is, what is it?
Joe Murray: An excellent question. No one knows, Derek. Active Directory is a Microsoft technology that basically combined directory services of users and computers into one, sort of, software.
So, basically it makes IT work way easier for organizations because it’s a central management point for all of your users on your network, and all of your computers on your network. So, you can push policies to those computers, you can create users, delete users. It’s, very, very good. And it was definitely, you know, a…
Derek DeWitt: Certainly a time saver.
Joe Murray: Absolutely. But nowadays, as we mentioned earlier, people are really moving to the cloud. So, you’ve got cloud-based stuff. And Microsoft has adapted AD into a cloud offering (it’s part of their Azure offering). But a lot of people are completely rethinking how they manage computers and users over the internet.
And that’s where you get into single sign-on stuff like SAML. That’s where you get into some more complex technologies that we’ve started rolling out into Signage Suite.
Derek DeWitt: And what’s the benefit of this single sign-on business?
Joe Murray: So, I’m personally a big fan of single sign-on because it eliminates a lot of passwords, and it eliminates a lot…
Derek DeWitt: Oh, thank god!
Joe Murray: Yeah. Finally!
Derek DeWitt: I’m sooo sick of it.
Joe Murray: I think we finally, as a society, hit a breaking point where we started getting more complex password requirements and all these different passwords.
Derek DeWitt: Well, and they’re not standard. So, you’re like, oh, this one needs a capital letter, this one won’t let me have a capital letter, this one has to be six…
Joe Murray: Gotta have that special character!
Derek DeWitt: Yeah. I mean, it’s maddening. And you know, I read an article a few months ago that (said from some IT folks who said) passwords are the worst way.
Joe Murray: Oh, they are the worst.
Derek DeWitt: Because, I mean you see it on movies and TV where like, ooh, the guy just taps the keyboard for a while; “Oh I broke it.” And all I could assume is that the guy’s trying to do brute force. There’s no way he broke that in an hour.
Joe Murray: Yeah. Passwords are the worst. Like I said when I worked in healthcare IT, we tried to get rid of passwords years ago because that was a constant vulnerability – is users just leaving their passwords written out on sticky notes and everything.
Derek DeWitt: Well, you know what the most common password is, still?
Joe Murray: It’s like “password”.
Derek DeWitt: It’s “password”.
Joe Murray: It’s unbelievable.
Derek DeWitt: It’s so… And then “1234” is next.
Joe Murray: Yeah. “Qwerty” is probably, I’m sure, a password.
Derek DeWitt: That’s what Mr. Robot shows if anybody watches that show. Mr. Robot shows that the way you hack a password is you hack the person.
Joe Murray: Absolutely. It’s “social engineering”, I believe, is what they call it. But anyway to re-focus: so, single sign-on basically takes care of a lot of that by saying, “You know what, instead of every service you use having its own, unique username and password combination, we’re just going to give you one username, one password, and that’s going to log you into all of the services that you use.”
Derek DeWitt: Right. “I, as a program, will take care of all the little fiddly business.”
Joe Murray: Exactly. So, it is very truly single sign-on. You sign in once and you’ve signed in everywhere. And so, we just integrated a version of single sign-on into Signage Suite, and it’s called SAML (or the Security Assertion Markup Language for those playing at home).
Derek DeWitt: I did wonder what it meant.
Joe Murray: Now you know. Specifically, we’re using version 2 of that standard. So, I know that we’ve tested this with Azure AD (which is sort of what I was hinting on earlier) with Okta, with Shibboleth, and with CAS.
Derek DeWitt: “Shibboleth”. That’s a great name.
Joe Murray: Yeah, that’s a good one. Any others, tons of other SAML providers, as long as they comply with that SAML 2.0 specification, should work with Signage Suite.
Derek DeWitt: Really?
Joe Murray: And it’s been great. You know, we’ve just started rolling it out, but we’ve had a 100% success rate with all these providers, all these single sign-on providers.
Derek DeWitt: Well, that ain’t shabby.
Joe Murray: Ain’t that neat? And it’s been really, really cool. You know, customers really love it, and especially IT because, or I should say, let me back up… users love it because they only have, you know, one username and password for other services.
Derek DeWitt: It’s still “password” but still, you know.
Joe Murray: But still, it’s just the one. And then IT love it because it’s way more secure. So, it’s really, really nice. You don’t have to remember a specific password for your digital signage.
Derek DeWitt: I was reading something, again this article about how passwords are so, they’re not really very secure at all, and you can very often guess what somebody’s password is. Or, if you have enough computers, you could brute force break it just by trying all the combinations.
But they have devices now that, like infrared cameras allow you to see heat, it allows you to see WiFi in a space. And the way that you move through a room, and thus that WiFi signal, is different than the way that I move through it, which is different from the way that Sean moves through it. The way that we move is completely unique to us. Even though it’s just a silhouette, they can identify, “Oh, that’s Joe” from the way that he moves.
Joe Murray: And you definitely didn’t get this from just Mission Impossible, right?
Derek DeWitt: No, no, no. This is a real thing. I know it sounds crazy, right? And so, there’s an idea that eventually they’ll get this technology to the point where your laptop or your phone or whatever will automatically know it’s you through a combination of recognizing your face, recognizing the way that you hold it, recognizing the way that you move. And so, it will just automatically turn on when you approach it. But when I approach your computer, it won’t turn on.
Joe Murray: Oh, I mean I’ve got that on my iPhone right here.
Derek DeWitt: Really?
Joe Murray: I’ve got the iPhone 10 and it’s got face ID. So, you can just look at it and it does a 3D scan of my face and will unlock just for me.
Derek DeWitt: But if I make a mask of your face…
Joe Murray: Supposedly, it still won’t work because it uses, oh gosh, what does Apple call it?
Derek DeWitt: Is it like heat?
Joe Murray: Like “subdermal processing” or something.
Derek DeWitt: Oh, okay.
Joe Murray: It’s a whole thing. It’s really cool. I’ve found it…I’ve never had an issue with it.
Derek DeWitt: So, I’d have to kill you and take your face off. Like Hannibal Lecter.
Joe Murray: Absolutely. And then you can finally read those text messages that I’ve got.
Derek DeWitt: Thank God! What are some common mistakes people make with trying to get networking and digital signage to work together? I can say not allocating enough bandwidth can be a bit of an issue. If your signage is comprised of just, you know, pictures, text messages, then that’s all good and fine.
Derek DeWitt: PowerPoint slides.
Joe Murray: Yeah, PowerPoint slides. That’s not going to take up a lot of bandwidth. Full HD used to be the standard; we’re moving to 4K as the new resolution standard.
Derek DeWitt: And I actually heard that there’s an 8K.
Joe Murray: Yup, absolutely. That’s already in draft specifications.
Derek DeWitt: Isn’t that ridiculous?
Joe Murray: It looks cool.
Derek DeWitt: Can the human eye even see a difference?
Joe Murray: There’s a lot to it, you know. It comes down to…
Derek DeWitt: 300K!
Joe Murray: Yeah, exactly. It comes down to like color accuracy and refresh rate, all this other stuff. But there’s definitely a point of diminishing returns I would say.
Derek DeWitt: Yeah, I think at a certain point it’s just a game.
Joe Murray: Yeah, but basically you do need to remember to allocate proper bandwidth for your signage system.
Derek DeWitt: Meaning on the network.
Joe Murray: Absolutely, on the network. Because if you are synchronizing all these larger 4K videos and everything, and maybe they’re 10 minutes each or, you know…
Derek DeWitt: Right, that’s a lot of data.
Joe Murray: That’s a lot of data moving around. And if you want your content to publish and synchronize pretty quickly, then you better not have just some regular 10 megabit per second connection. You probably want something like 10/100/1000 networking, something like that. You know, gigabit networking.
It is worth noting though (because I know development will kill me if I don’t mention this) we’re not streaming content from either our cloud server or on-prem server to your players. It is sort of synchronized in what’s called “blobs”. Seriously.
Derek DeWitt: Really? That’s fun!
Joe Murray: Yeah, well we have the best terms in tech.
Derek DeWitt: “Blobs”!
Joe Murray: We have “GUI”, “blobs”, “cookies”, you know, it’s good stuff. If you take a video and you’ve uploaded it to your Manage server, and then you want that video to play on your Engage players, the server does not stream the video from the players.
Derek DeWitt: Which is what Netflix does and YouTube does.
Joe Murray: Exactly. Yeah, so that that is a constant use of bandwidth.
Rather, you upload the video to the Manage server, the Manage server will synchronize it to the players, and then once the player has it stored on its local hard drive, it’s actually not using bandwidth anymore, it’s not really utilizing the network.
Derek DeWitt: It’s temporarily local.
Joe Murray: Exactly. It’s local to the players. Which is nice because it’s not taking up bandwidth, it’s not constantly bogging down your network. But it’s also nice because, if your network goes down, if your server goes down, something like that…
Derek DeWitt: It still works.
Joe Murray: Exactly. The content still works. Which is worth noting. I think a lot of customers are under the impression we’re streaming stuff all the time. We’re just doing, basically, synchronization. And then once everything is local to the players.
Derek DeWitt: Bloop. Here ya go. And then it goes…
Joe Murray: Exactly.
Derek DeWitt: Then what, does that expire after a certain amount of time? Does it withdraw it?
Joe Murray: No. So what happens is, depending on how you’ve set up Signage Suite, it can be down to, or as quick as, every five minutes the player will check with the server and say, “Hey, is the content the same that I have locally? Has the user made a new layout? Have they changed something on the layout? Have they deleted content, made new content?” And if the server says, “Yeah, you know, actually, you’ve got a new schedule now.” Then the server will provide that content to the player, and the player will pull it.
Derek DeWitt: That’s pretty interesting.
Joe Murray: It’s pretty cool.
Derek DeWitt: So, bandwidth., Very, very important.
Joe Murray: Yeah.
Derek DeWitt: Anything else?
Joe Murray: I’m going to mention firewalls again because we do use…
Derek DeWitt: I’ve always wondered how the heck this works with firewalls. Especially at universities, I know it can be tricky.
Joe Murray: It can be a little tricky. Especially if you have universities that have multiple different schools (like the School of Engineering, the School of Architecture) and they all have different segments on their network, and they have different firewalls. It’s a whole thing.
So, the firewall ports are very, very important, especially if you’re cloud-based, because you’ve got to make sure to open up the ports to the outside world. That’s very important. Making sure that you’ve looked at our Networking Guide (I think we’ve got it available on the website.)
Derek DeWitt: Yes.
Joe Murray: So, you definitely want to make sure that your IT has looked over the Networking Guide to make sure that all the proper ports are opened, that your server is at the correct specifications that we want, that your networks are at the correct specifications. Because otherwise it can just lead to a subpar experience or the product may not work at all. That’s not fun.
Derek DeWitt: Right. Which is certainly suboptimal.
Joe Murray: Yes, that’s a little suboptimal, as we say.
Derek DeWitt: You’re not just buying a consumer product here. You’re not going to do an unboxing video of digital signage.
Joe Murray: Right, right.
Derek DeWitt: It’d be a very long, weeklong, video.
Joe Murray: Unfortunately, and also fortunately, we’ve sort of been spoiled by consumer tech nowadays, because consumer tech has never done more, and it’s never been easier to do a lot of stuff.
Derek DeWitt: I mean, seriously.
Joe Murray: Seriously!
Derek DeWitt: I’m an Android guy. I had a (I kept it for five years), I had the Galaxy S5. I went, “Okay, it’s no longer able to handle these new apps. So it’s disintegrating. So, like it won’t work at all.” So, I got the S10. And you know, in the old days, when I went from an S3 to an S5 I had to, you know, spend hours downloading this and this. Now, it just says, “Do you want me to find” (there’s a little thing you click) “do you want me to find any other Samsung phones in the area?” And I said, “Yes!”
Joe Murray: Sure!
Derek DeWitt: And it found my old S5 and it just said, “Okay, I’m gonna just go to pull everything off that.” And it pulled all the files, all the apps, the address book, everything. It missed one thing.
Joe Murray: That’s cool.
Derek DeWitt: So, I just went boom. I made a sandwich. I came back. It was done.
Joe Murray: Magic!
Derek DeWitt: And I was like, “That is amazing!” Yeah, I think that’s a very good point. We’re really spoiled.
Joe Murray: We are very spoiled by consumer tech. Exactly.
So, the classic phrase, “Just make it work!” What I think a lot of customers find, a lot of smaller customers especially, that aren’t used to enterprise-grade solutions like our products, is that there is set up. You know, the magic doesn’t just happen. Because things need to be redundant. Our software needs to account for all these use cases.
Unfortunately, it’s not just a boom, bam out-of-the-box, everything-just-works experience. It’s a collaboration. It’s a whole setup. But once it gets set up, you know, everything’s great and it works really well.
Derek DeWitt: And each deployment’s unique.
Joe Murray: Absolutely.
Derek DeWitt: There are so many unique individualizing factors in each deployment that it just has to be that way.
Joe Murray: Exactly. Exactly.
Derek DeWitt: Just like each audience is unique (and so the content that you put onto your digital signage is tailored to them) the actual physical infrastructure of that digital signage is also going to be unique to your particular organization. So that’s a lot of good food for thought. Thank you very much, Mr. Joe Murray.
Joe Murray: Thank you.
Derek DeWitt: And thank you, everybody, for listening.