Gail Chiasson, North American Editor
Real Digital Media, Sarasota, Florida-based provider of the enterprise class NEOCAST digital signage platform, finally has put its foot solidly into the European market with its agreement with London-based Integrated Signage Solutions Ltd.
RDM is a finalist in two categories this Thursday evening
ISS has agreed to represent NEOCAST products throughout Europe. The agreement signals the formal entry of NEOCAST into the European marketplace and grants ISS exclusive rights to market, license and support the NEOCAST platform.
“We’ve been looking at the European market for quite a while,” Ken Goldberg, Real Digital’s CEO, told us during an exclusive interview Monday. “We’ve had many leads there in the past but could never close a deal because we had no boots in the market. Then Kismet came into play.”
An unidentified consultant helped put the deal together, and Real Digital Media will be working closely with ISS to develop a solution-based approach to differentiate the offering in the European marketplace. ISS has a fully trained staff offering consultative and network operations services to customers, augmenting the content and ad sales services already in operation.
“When we showed our software to David Da Costa, CEO of ISS’ Wonderworks subsidiary, he was really pumped about it,” says Goldberg. “We worked out an exclusive arrangement, and our software will now be the centre of ISS’s platform business. And the nice thing about this is that we don’t have to open a separate office. It already has its own business lab, office and top people.
“We feel that in ISS we have found the partner best positioned to make NEOCAST a very serious contender in that strategic European market. Given the hands-on experience of the ISS team with so many software offerings, we were energized by how quickly they embraced NEOCAST. We expect that their customers and prospects will have the same reaction.”
“With ISS bringing Walkway Media and Wonderworks 3D under a single ownership structure, all we required to bring a true end-to-end solution offering to the market was a reliable and scalable technical platform,” says Da Costa. “Adding NEOCAST as the technical core of our solution not only answers that challenge, but lets us build our offering with the confidence you get by partnering with an established and respected provider to the industry.”
ISS has launched the partnership by announcing that it is installing the NEOCAST platform in new sites of its fast-growing Walkway Media mall network in the UK. Existing Walkway sites will begin to transition starting in 2013.
Da Costa says, “Customers will appreciate that we don’t just promote NEOCAST, but run our own network on it. There is a certain perspective and credibility one gains by having the luxury of using what you sell.”
Real Digital is a privately held company incubated in 2002 and owned by a group of angel investors and management of the company, including Michael Baron, president, and Goldberg.
NEOCAST is an enterprise class digital signage platform for managing the efficient distribution of place-based targeted messages and branded experiences across networked displays. Designed intelligently to scale with the growing demands of the DOOH industry, NEOCAST is a standards-based platform that offers certainty to marketing and advertising professionals seeking a viable long-term solution to meet the current and future demands of their digital signage deployments. It has been used to establish point-of-decision marketing, promotions and corporate communication networks across the retail, healthcare and hospitality sectors.
ISS is the holding company for Wonderworks 3D Media and Walkway Media. Operating from UK offices in London and Chelmsford, the company offers end-to-end solutions to digital out-of-home networks, including technology, content development and management, network operations and local/regional advertising sales. The company’s Walkway Media network spans more than 30 shopping centres and malls in the UK, and is expanding rapidly.
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