Adrian J Cotterill, Editor-in-Chief
Following on from last week’s post ‘EnQii – #DSTop10 Vendors Review‘ this time around we are going to take a look at STRATACACHE, our number 2 in 2008 and number 10 in 2007.
Remember we said we’d be harsh in our appraisals – (perhaps) being nice again when we do the Top 10 Digital Signage Vendors 2010 proper in February.
We make no secret of the fact that we are great admirers of STRATACACHE and as we wrote a few weeks ago “especially their CEO Chris Riegel, who may sometimes perhaps be a little abrasive but is surely one of the smartest, if not the smartest guy in the digital signage world” (Lou Giacalone, Jr. of CoolSign perhaps giving him a run for his money).
STRATACACHE is a privately owned company with a turnover of something like USD 100 Million – built from the ground up by Chris (no venture capital), that’s an impressive enough achievement – doubly so when you think how poorly many companies, even the established ones, actually fare in the digital signage / digital out of home space.
Digital Signage and Digital Out of Home makes up probably 50% of their turnover. In the relatively short time that STRATACACHE has turned its attention to our sector they have sealed some very clever deals (AT&T and Bloomberg for example) and won some great pieces of business especially in retail – mainly in grocery and retail banking (and these are big, big customers).
If STRATACACHE have failed at anything it has been new business outside the US (as regular followers of our top 10 will know this is one of the areas we want to have addressed, even for basic inclusion in the list) – that’s not to say they don’t have any business but they have stalled for most of this year in gaining more traction and it’s only this past month that they have found a suitable guy to run EMEA – see ‘Jason Palmer Heads Up EMEA For STRATACACHE‘ – rumours of Chris Riegel being a hard man to work for go alongside his ‘abrasive’ personality!
One of the things we like about STRATACACHE is that they continue to innovate and seek out new markets – especially new ways to enter new markets (think, their Bloomberg deal). Again two recent initiatives show some ingenuity; one was getting hold of Patrick Gilbert, ex-Sony Broadcast to go head to head with Cisco in the stadium business and secondly was their iPhone app – really cleverly thought out and well implemented.
Chris often says “Just go out and listen to what the customers want and you can drive new lines of business” and true to his word that is what he does.
Whilst STRATACACHE eschew trade associations they do support exhibitions and are regulars at DSE, InfoComm, NAB and Screen Media Expo Europe.
#DSTop10 posts are kindly sponsored by Magenta Research
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