DISPLAYS 01732 759725 27 magazine Corporate sales A third area of growth is the corporate sector, which has benefited from the opening up of offices after lockdown and the boom in meeting rooms to meet the needs of a hybrid workforce, as well as greater awareness of the benefits of moving to digital whether for sustainability or cost control reasons. “COVID was a very difficult time from a business perspective, but throughout 2019 we still saw quite significant growth. A lot of that was down to our monitor division, which falls under professional displays. People were no longer able to go into the office and found that working off their laptop display was unacceptable, so we saw a significant uplift in sales of professional monitors during that period.” As examples, Haywood highlights Samsung Smart Monitors, which met the needs of people without a dedicated home office by doubling as a business monitor and as an entertainment hub, and Samsung’s entry into the kiosk market with products that could be used for queue management and wayfinding to help people feel safe moving into public spaces after lockdown. “Then, as we transitioned out of COVID and offices started to open up, there was that pent-up demand from corporate refresh phases and new builds that needed to be finished quickly, which helped almost to kickstart the market.” Other significant trends in the corporate sector, he suggests, are the growth of managed services, the emergence of new ways of buying technology and the integration of software solutions from Samsung and third parties. “Some of the system integrators, particularly the larger ones, have their own leasing companies behind them, while others will come to us or a third party. In the UK, there’s a Samsung business unit called Samsung Finance that is there to help customers and reseller partners to deploy displays as a service. Subject to certain criteria, we can do almost any project. It’s not just a case of financial support. It also involves putting in place a refresh programme, allowing for enhancements to technology and other considerations.” These include the bundling of software solutions such as MagicINFO, Samsung’s own content management platform which enables customers to design, display and manage their digital content, and MagicINFO Remote Management, which allow IT departments or third parties to manage an entire network of displays. “We can work with IT departments in small to medium-sized corporate environments to manage every single display on their network.We’ve all gone to sit down in a meeting and found that the last person in there has unplugged the network cable or taken the power out or neglected to report a fault on the display. Our remote management solutions allow you to manage everything around these displays, so you can proactively get into that meeting room before the next people arrive and rectify the core issue. “One of my customers in the retail world has in the region of 200 displays per store and most retail stores don’t have any IT trained staff. They’re all retail experts and product experts. If we can help maintain the uptime of those displays, it gives a better shopping experience for their customers. That can either be done by the reseller or by the customer.We sell the products through our reseller network to the end user, but we’re also seeing more and more reseller partners integrate this remote management solution into their own network operating centres as part of their value-add to their customers.” In addition to its own solutions, the Samsung Smart Signage Platform (SSSP) allows partners to develop their own applications and offer them out to the Samsung display network so that customers can choose the applications that best suit their requirements. Haywood adds that, together, Samsung and third-party solutions are continuing to transform the capabilities and applications of display technologies. “If you go back a few years, a display was a rectangular object on a wall or the corner of a desk. It was nothing more than a mechanism for presenting information. Then, as we started to add things like system-on-chip for compute power, building that smart signage platform infrastructure and then starting to overlay touch, the display started to go from something that couldn’t do a great deal to something that is almost all-encompassing. “The next piece for me is no longer just the display. It’s the connected meeting room. Look at the way Samsung devices in a domestic environment can all hang together – you’ve got smart fridges and smart washing machines and smart tumble dryers and smart kettles all connected through a Samsung infrastructure – and how we can move that into the corporate space to enhance smart meeting room capability and smart buildings. It’s no longer just about selling a product; it’s about being smarter and being more sustainable.”
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