Andrew Broster, Evexi

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT

The UK software firm Evexi has an interesting story behind its move into digital signage - in that it was more a pull from a client than a push by the company itself.

They got deeper into it because of a client's needs, and then a change in technology support that really forced the hand of the customer and Evexi.

A few years on from that big moment, Evexi is growing out its CMS software business based around a very modern, headless platform and tools that the company says manage to bridge a need for being dead-simple to use but also deeply sophisticated and hyper-secure.

CEO Andrew Broster relates in this podcast the story behind Evexi, and how it goes to market. There's also a very interesting anecdote in there about how lift and learn tech is more than just a visual trick for retail merchandising - with Broster telling how it was driving serious sales lift for a big whiskey brand.

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TRANSCRIPT

Andrew, thank you for coming on this podcast. Can you give me a rundown, like the elevator ride story of Evexi? 

Andrew Broster: Sure. Thanks for having me, Dave. My background is very technical. I spent about ten years prior to setting up Evexi running a managed service for a private cloud-based business. In 2015, Sky came to us through a partner and asked for an advertising platform to be built into pub networks, where they had 10,000 pubs under contract to sell Sky Sports to. 

We walked away and said, what was the question? But eight months later, the product was released into the pub network and it has nearly 2,700 pubs going live within just under 12 months and really from there, we were working with an existing CMS provider, Scala and we learned a lot of the pains with integrating into third-party systems, platforms, building, customer portals, because the traditional CMSs are not user friendly, and as a result, that was our first digital signage customer and our first project that we launched.

So what would you call yourself when you were getting into this with Sky, were you like an independent software vendor who just did custom work for customers? 

Andrew Broster: Correct. Yeah, it was literally, “Hey, Andrew, we need to build this workflow portal.” We were trying to solve problems at a software level for end users through, in those days, it was actually still the channel and that was the first exposure we ever had to the channel. 

Okay. Now, though, you have your own product. 

Andrew Broster: Yes, at the end of 2018, early 2019, we launched Evexi, purely on the grounds of Sky needing a different CMS vendor because Scala was the end-of-life Samsung system on chip support and yeah, Evexi came live and we flipped 2,700 pubs overnight onto our platform, and we were talking about taking a big leap, that was a big leap for and a big learning curve 

And how do you do that overnight? The common perception would be if you're going to change 2,000 devices over you've got to visit 2,000 devices or you've got to Telnet into them or something or other and monkey around with each of them 

Andrew Broster: No, what we ended up doing was as we created a reboot script that was rewriting the URL from the URL launcher on a Samsung screen and instead of Scala, we flipped them remotely to ourselves. 

So with this business, you were asked to develop something for a specific client. Did you look at the marketplace and go, all right, we can do this for sure. We've got a client who wants it We can turn this into a larger business, but boy, there are already a lot of CMS software platforms out there, how do we differentiate ourselves?

Andrew Broster: I don't think it was even that really. I think right back in the beginning my other shareholder said to me, is this a mistake? Are we going to just generate a lot of debt within the business? Is this a hard business to get into? I spent probably about three to four months, looking at the landscape, looking at companies, competitors, and companies that basically had one successful client and then struggled to grow out of the single client, and really from my point of view, it was, because I was very technical by nature, I wanted to be able to build a platform that was using the latest technologies. A lot of our competitors, less so now, but at the time in 2018-2019, were using a lot of aging software technologies, and scaling issues, so just single servers. 

I'm a network architect by trade. I wanted to build a cloud-based platform that uses the same technologies as Amazon AWS and Netflix, and that really for me was the ability to have what I call a native cloud product and not make the same mistakes that everybody else does, because when you're building a product and trying to go to market, you have to really try and avoid making all your competitors' mistakes.

So you ended up with what I believe you describe as a headless CMS, right? 

Andrew Broster: Yeah, it's a headless CMS. By design it was headless, and then we put in a very simple UI because we had right back in those days, about 2,300 landlords wanting to publish their own content. So it really had to be very straightforward to use and we wanted to automate everything else in the backend. So things like rendering automatic web content, being able to have a platform that's open that anyone can build onto. 

I'm from an open-source background originally, so I wanted to make these tools readily available to all of the partners and the ecosystem we’re working in.

So when you say headless CMS, what does that mean for a typical end user? 

What I think about is that you've got creatives, people who are working on online products and so on, who don't want to back out of their normal workflow, platforms and log into something separate just to do digital signage.

Andrew Broster: Correct, and for the larger companies integrating into our APIs, which are publicly available, means that we become an extension of their product suite rather than copy and pasting and moving content around. We just end up at the end of the line of the production, and then content gets scheduled, instead of having to log into another system. I'm a big fan of automating and integrating everything.

What would be a good kind of reference example of companies that you're working with that you're allowed to talk about? 

Andrew Broster: Sky is the obvious one. We did a lot of work with David Lloyd, on some projects for their gyms. Johnny Walker and Diageo in South Africa. And they've integrated into our APIs as well, whereby, they had a lift and learn solution using Nexomsphere integrated into Evexi. They built their own web apps sitting on top of a platform for the customer user journey, and then every time you want to go and change products, they have their own merchandising platform. So it gives the whole user journey without even touching a backseat, to be honest with you, and we just turn into ultimately a distribution engine because what we're doing is providing the player to be sophisticated and be able to play whatever content has been built and developed, but the changing the scheduling and interaction of it is all done through our APIs.

So you mentioned the Sky project. That's still fully going. What kind of footprint does that have at the moment? 

Andrew Broster: It still has around 2,000 screens. I think they're very heavily looking at the market at the moment, and seeing who else is doing it. Stone Gates are doing a great job at the moment, running out of a media platform into a pub network and I think it's fair to say we all collectively are just watching that to be honest with 

You're all watching it for? 

Andrew Broster: To see how that project evolves and whether it's going to be a success. I mean Sky were the early adopters of this in pub networks and I think like anything in this world, to be able to attract the big liquor brands and the beverage brands, you need to have a reasonable footfall, and that was always the argument right back in the beginning. How do you pump advertising revenue into your advertising network, unless you've got a footfall of half a million to three quarters of a million people. 

Right. You're doing a lot of work with Nexonsphere. I just did a podcast with them a couple of weeks ago. 

Andrew Broster: I know them well. 

I like what they do and it's interesting that “Lift and Learn” is something that's been around for 20 years, but it used to be really hard to do. Is that what's being used for Johnny Walker and could you describe it? 

Andrew Broster: Yes, it is exactly that. So if you walk into a liquor store in South Africa, you can pick up a product. It'll tell you about the product. You can pick up another product. It'll compare the two products, and then you follow the user journey on a screen after you've picked up the products to be able to inquire or pick up more information about the product.

So in the Johnny Walker world, it's about understanding the different flavors of Johnny Walker and what the blend and what the mixes you have with the alcohol and the key to all of that is to understand who's using the product and to be able to provide that information back to the brand. 

For me, that was a great project for us because we had so little involvement. I know that sounds ridiculous, but when you have a technical partner who is very tech focused, very marketing focused and who knows how to build apps using documentation, we have very little interaction, but I think really the beauty of it is the numbers that are coming back now is that they're seeing across, I think it's about 160 to 180 sites, they're seeing between a 40 and 42 percent uplift in sales and the tills as a result of using learned because they're doing a lot of A/B testing.

So we know it works, and for us, it's making the next must be integration. Now, you don't have these drop down menus, don't have a CMS that's completely and utterly configure-centric, just need to be able to build out your solution because no Lift and Learn solution is the same and you need to be able to get there in 5 or 10 minutes.

Right, because you want this to be largely in the hands of the integrator, the provider, whoever. 

Andrew Broster: Our objective is to make the integrators' lives easy. If we can't make their lives easy, what's the point really from my point of view, frankly, of existing. They need to make money like we need to make money and the easiest way of doing that is just to make their lives easy.

When you're on a journey of looking at getting into space and analyzing the other platforms that are out there, the other approaches and so on, what kind of conclusions did you draw about what you needed to do?

Andrew Broster: How I looked at it was: We have many small customers and we have some very nice blue chip, large customers, and ultimately you need to make the small customers' lives very easy, three steps to be able to publish content and manage your content, and then when it comes to the big boys, you need to be able to become an extension of their existing workflows.

Our goal really was, is to just build something that one is open, and two is very easy for an end user to use, because ultimately, in our space, we have systems integrators that are ultimately just resellers and they just resell the service and they're not technical, and then we have other integrators that we call our technical partners that are hugely technical. I want to be able to do stuff that we haven't even dreamt of yet, and it's the ability for them to be able to have that platform to do what they want. 

So if you're going to do headless, it sounds like you have to have that capability, but for the small to medium business customer, they're probably not going to use the headless element so you've got to have a full UX for them, right? 

Andrew Broster: But you've just got to give them a really easy journey. If they can use Facebook or they can use Instagram, they should be able to use a CMS. It should be as simple as that. Ultimately, our goal is login. 

In our world, it's, you've got three things. You've got a player, you've got media, and you've got to be able to publish it, and it shouldn't be more complicated than that because that's what the smaller clients want. They want to be able to schedule content and they want to be able to update content very easily. 

Is there a particular market vertical that you guys are strong in? Is it retail or is it QSR? 

Andrew Broster: It's a fight between the two at the moment. We're doing a lot more work with Elo, Micro Touch in the U.S. at the moment. So we are using Blue Star in the U.S. to sell through to the channel, and so QSR is an interesting space because of the Square integration. You can plug a square device in and a touch screen in and within 20 minutes you can have QSR running on a touch screen to be able to do the ordering. It's four clicks in our system. You authenticate against the Square, you choose your products and off you go. So that space for us is very exciting for us.

In the retail side, I think predominantly because of the way we position our product for integrations into Nexomsphere and stuff like that, that makes it quite an attractive offering. 

With kiosk, and point of sale, I don't know that world all that well, but, Square, I think about it as transaction processing. Do you still have to jack into a point of sale system or is that something you can provide? 

Andrew Broster: No, we are ultimately like a silent salesman sitting there. So we're literally integrated straight into Square’s APIs. We pull up the products and we're just another method of ordering. So we work and the integration works just like online ordering, but we're just presenting it on a pretty screen, which is touch enabled. So that integration for us Is key, but actually very simplistic 

Because you're doing from what I can tell on the web, a lot of kinds of interactive work and use portrait screens to do that. I see most digital science platforms as being very distinctly oriented around landscape and large format displays that don't have interactive. Is it hard to straddle the two? 

Andrew Broster: No, not really. At the end of the day, it's a player for us. We have customers who've got large LED screens which is great, works very well. I would say we're particularly strong in the portrait side of the world. 

But at the end of the day, all this technology doesn't work without any content creators. So we've got some very nice strategic content partners that do all of this work, which worked very well with our systems integrators. 

So you would just point to them when a customer asks, you say, “These guys can help you out?” 

Andrew Broster: Yeah, so if they don't have it in house and we say look, sure, no problem. We've got three or four of our preferred content partners who are actually quite tech and web app enabled, so they like to do some of the experiential stuff which ultimately then boils back down into the Nexomsphere world. So there again, it's a nice blend. 

I believe you got into this in part, to do the Sky thing, that at that point it was a system on chip displays. Is that accurate? 

Andrew Broster: Yes. So Sky has a very close relationship with Samsung, and the remit was that they had to be a Samsung screen system on chip. Now we're going back to 2015-2016 models, the very first generation way before Tizen. So yeah, that was the requirement, and off the back of that, it was, which CMS vendor can support these screens? Because in those days, system on ships didn't support portraits. You had to do clever stuff to make the content play in portrait in those days. That was the reality of it, and then, yes, in those early days, it was Scala that we originally integrated into.

Then once Chris Regal and Stratacash bought Scala, that was the end of Samsung and SoC, right? 

Andrew Broster: It absolutely was. It was, I think the initial shock was, what do we do next? But as I said before, Sky came to us and said, look, we have to keep this advertising network running. We need it supported. We need a platform that can scale a lot further than it currently runs at the moment, and we welcome that challenge, really. Don't forget we, at the time we were only seven or eight strong, we're now nineteen strong straddling three countries. So we've grown up a lot since then, but for a company of that size at the time, it was quite a big challenge.

One of the things that I've heard through the years with system on chip smart displays is as you alluded to when they first came out, they weren't very powerful, weren't very capable. 

I heard, as subsequent generations came along, they got quite good, they got quite powerful, but more recently, I've heard the opposite that because of the demands that are out there now for end devices that they can't handle everything, that they don't have the processing power to maybe do stuff that has aspects of AI related to it or anything else. I'm curious about your experience. 

Andrew Broster: I think if you look at it from a HD point of view, no issues, 4k, don't see any issues. We saw some early issues in around Tizen 4 particularly. So we're talking about three or four years ago. Tizen 6, 6. 5 and 7 have been reasonably good. 

Don't forget, we now integrate using Nexomsphere controllers, we're doing a lot of work with LIDAR, with Nexomsphere as well and predominantly these Tizen screens, they're just very dependent, not only on the processor, but on the Chromium version. If you're running a screen that's running a four year old Chromium version, you're going to have a whole ball ache when it comes to doing some cool stuff. But the later the Chromium release, the more feature rich, it actually becomes. 

So there's no issue handling the complexity of content? 

Andrew Broster: No, we have thousands of Samsung screens on our estate. They are in our world probably the most reliable devices.

I have heard that there's been a push lately amongst end users to go to independent standalone media players and to decouple from the displays and not be relying on them. Are you hearing that in the community? 

Andrew Broster: Yep, we are. 

What’s driving that? 

Andrew Broster: So just to summarize we support anything Tizen, let's just say anything Samsung WebOS. We support Linux, Windows, Pi5 as well but I wouldn't run an estate on a Pi5. We're seeing a lot of drive now down the Android route, and my background is security, and I've always had a huge aversion to going near Android players.

But there are a couple of new parties involved in the market that we're starting to work with who are releasing what we call their own orchestration platform for supporting Android so they can roll out thousands of these devices, keep them updated, keep them online and healthy and I'm actually quite receptive to it because I've always been very allergic to it, but going back to your point, I think a lot of it is possibly some of the integration issues or some of the requirements for external devices to function. 

It took us nearly two years to get Samsung to open a USB port for us. People don't hang around for two years just to be able to have an integration port, being able to have an external device using that, which natively support, is actually a huge stepping stone and a huge advantage. 

Why is that? 

Andrew Broster: Because there's no compatibility issues. if I have to keep going back to Samsung every time I want to be able to have another driver to support over USB, and they turn around and say, two years later, yeah, guys, we finally decided that there's a big enough opportunity in the market to do it. We will consider it. That's all well and good, but the smaller, external media player companies, can move a lot quicker than that. 

Right. I did an event where I was supposed to be using Samsung kiosk for checkin… 

Andrew Broster: Oh, don’t I know it. 

I just wanted to use a little thermal printer and they said, we don't have that because that needs a Windows driver and we don't have that, so too bad, so sad. 

Andrew Broster: Yep, absolutely. 

But just leave it at that. 

Andrew Broster: Put it this way. I mean we support the Samsung Kiosk on Tizen. They have a barcode and QR scanner. Does it work? Not really. They have a printer. Does it work? Yes, but it's only that printer. You can't plug anything else in it and it'd be supported because the Tizen operating system doesn't support it. So it's hardly surprising that people just go out and say, actually life's so much easier if I just plug another device into it, because I just know that the peripherals of work, and that for me is probably the approach I'd look at too. 

If I'm a large brand and I just want to roll out 1500s, let's call them devices, and then all of a sudden, the panel vendor says, no, we don't support that device. You can't wait for a decision to be made. You just got to get on with your project, and yes, that's a perfect space for media players. 

Because you've now been in this industry for some time, but spent a lot of time looking at it, where do you think things are at?

Because I see far too many software competitors out there and I'm always amazed when a small startup contacts me and says, we're doing this too, here's what we're up to, and I'm thinking, why did you start this? There's so many competitors to begin with. 

What do you see and what will happen? Because I just see the herd being thinned out. 

Andrew Broster: I think what I'm carefully observing at the moment is the number of acquisitions that are taking place. We see it, if we look at grass, fish and dice, and the aggregation and the buying up of what I look at as like the supply chain and ultimately trying to go direct. 

I think that's for me, I think that opens more doors than it closes for us. Not only on the fact that, ultimately my business needs to have a value and it needs to be able to be, one day, I would like to walk away from this. From my point of view, looking at it and seeing one, competitor being swallowed up or acquired by systems integrators is a great thing. But two, it also leaves a very open to us because what then happens is you've got a UK based company buying from fragments like a what was a European digital signage software platform who's now actually realistically going to become a direct competitor because they will then start competing in the same space for the same customer base. For me, that's great. We get calls quite regularly saying, oh yeah, but yeah, we can't buy those licenses anymore because they're now a competitor. The board won't approve it. 

So from my point of view, it's great, and it's exciting, and for us, we're picking up new businesses as a result of it. What I'm seeing, which I'm quite enjoying at the moment is a lot of the hype around retail media. I did a podcast couple of weeks ago about it, with one of our systems integrators. Chris Regal is doing a great job of talking and educating the market. I think his insights are very valuable. I have a lot of respect for Chris. I have done all of these, even going back to when he acquired Scala, but I haven't yet seen a very good implementation of a retail media network.

I don't travel the globe every day, but I do a fair amount of travel. But I think really for my business and other businesses our side, the retail media side of it is purely targeted messaging, ultimately, if you want me to look at it that way. I don't think that's exciting.

Who would you describe as a good partner company and a channel to work with, because there are some integrators who I tend to call solutions providers because they truly understand it versus AV systems integrators who are really good at deploying stuff in workplaces and other kinds of spaces like that, but they don't understand content, they don't understand the software. They just put stuff in. 

Andrew Broster: Yeah, hang and bang as I call it. 

Yeah. I don't like to use that term because they don't like it, but that's... 

Andrew Broster: There's no disrespect. Yeah, to it, to any of those guys, everybody has their business model, right?

We have this really nice blend of very sophisticated system integrators down to the ones that just want to look after the smaller end users, and they're as valuable to us as anybody, because we give them tools that they just go in and plug in and exercise. That's an easy route for us really, because we were selling a box product with an add on, and they can go in and install a box product with an add on and it's just two pieces of software for us. That's perfect. 

I think about end users and the enterprise level ones often wanting a fully managed solution where, look, we're going to outsource this thing to you guys, we'll give you direction and everything else, what we need, but you guys do it. 

Are you also seeing that with some of your channel partners that even relatively small deployments, they want that full managed solution? 

Andrew Broster: We are, and we're seeing more and more of it, and that's exactly where our systems integrators sit in that space, and that's great. More and more to be honest with you, I think, we saw years ago, like everybody wanting to move to the cloud and just push the problem away and trying to lower the cost of IT systems, right? 

I think what they're also trying to do now, certainly in the marketing side of these brands, is they want to be able to push that out and just know it's going to be looked after. It's easier to have a fully managed service for the systems integrator that has a help desk, a support system, people on the ground, technical experts and the partners that we work with, they're all certified Evexi Partners. 

We get maybe two or three calls a week from an escalation point of view with something, but the rest of it is handled by our systems integrators. 

That's a good situation. 

Andrew Broster: I always look at it erctainly the channel is we're like the software guys, we're not the help desk guys. We're the guys that want to build the software, look after the software and release more features in the software. The systems integrators are great at looking after the customer, supporting the customer and delivering everything to the customer. We fit in quite nicely. 

So it's either two things. Everything's going well, or they've given up on you. 

Andrew Broster: No, it's not, because I keep buying licenses, and that's a good thing. 

Absolutely. I believe you have a busy next few weeks coming up here. You're at NRF and then ISE.

Andrew Broster: Yeah. So we're at four trade shows in the space of four months. Next year we are with our partner's Ergonomic Solutions, NRF, which will be great, really looking forward to that. Our US market footprint's growing, so we're enjoying that relationship, Blue Star is an integral part of that. We enjoy working with those guys. 

ISE, again, the Ergonomic’s stand, we're showcasing a lot of new tech. So a lot of it is nice integrations with Nexomsphere as well. A lot of touch applications, experiential stuff. We're on the Nexomsphere stand with them as one of their supporting partners and we're on the Samsung stand, and then at the end of February, we go to Eurosys, which I find fascinating because it's a very different market and it's very retail focused. So we're there for a week and then we're at the Retail Tech Show again, and we'll be supporting three or four of our UK partners as well as Ergonomic Solutions as well at the Retail Tech Show. So it's a very busy beginning to the year. 

All right. I will let you get organized for all that. Thank you for taking some time with me. 

Andrew Broster: No problem at all. Thank you very much for having me.