Bill Gerba’s WireSpring were number 8 in our #DSTop10 in 2009 and those who know Bill (and there are not many in the industry surely who do not) then they will know what a great job he has continued doing for the industry. Did you know for example that WireSpring helped draft the current ‘digital signage privacy best practices’ document that has been circulated to the FTC to help keep our industry out of the hands of regulators in years to come?
Anyway that is besides the by. That’s not the reason why WireSpring made it into our top 10 in 2009 (they weren’t in our first list in 2008).
Whilst they are too quiet about their successes they have proven time and time again how global they are (not a month or a show seems to go by when we don’t meet a reseller).
Obviously the big news for WireSpring in 2009 was the release of FireCast EasyStart. With that they seem to have built up a base of over 50 new partners and resellers in approximately 30 countries around the world.
We estimate that they are on track to double that in 2010 which should mean that it will deliver deliver a positive ROI before the end of the year also.
Despite the down economy last year, WireSpring managed to raise its installed base of FireCast Enterprise customers by about 8 – 10% we believe.
On the technology front WireSpring seemed to focus mainly building their APIs and adding automated error tracking and screen review features for their larger clients.
They also added support for Intel Atom and Nvidia ION platforms (like many vendors – we are not saying they are the only ones doing this) hence enabling extremely low-cost, high-performance solutions for customers.
We believe that WireSpring won two extremely big deals in 2009 both of which will have high-hundreds to 1,000+ licenses by the end of the year.
It’s sometimes difficult to divorce WireSpring from Bill Gerba and vice versa but it’s worthwhile noting that Bill was named to POPAI’s Board of Directors, and along with Jeff Porter (from Scala) continue to drive the weekly technical standards committee toward building useful interoperability standards – take note Intel and Microsoft for your weak announcements about so-called industry standard platforms. The real work here is being done by POPAI, Ed
#DSTop10 posts are kindly sponsored by Magenta Research
February 18th, 2010 at 17:05 @753
Say what you really mean, Ed… don’t hold back on our account! 😉