Remote monitoring and device management are seemingly boring subjects, but they’re usually the first things I ask about when I am working with a consulting client that’s looking for a content management system.
There are many, many, many companies with products that make it easy to manage and distribute content, but I’m often surprised at how limited back-end management capabilities are for many platforms that otherwise looked pretty good.
The guys at ScreenScape in PEI, in Canada’s Maritimes, have for years had a product known as friendly, easy and affordable. Now they’re also going after bulletproof – having introduced something called Platinum Control. It’s billed as a software suite that “makes sophisticated, enterprise-grade remote monitoring and device management tools available to operators of any digital signage network, regardless of size, scale or budget.”
The company now uses a native software player – instead of a browser as the player – and that gives it all kinds of capabilities to know everything going with devices deployed in the field, and to remedy problems without sending a tech on site – which adds lots and lots of cost. Platinum Control, the company says in a press release, has “real-time features to maximize uptime, trim operating costs and even shape how and when content is delivered across digital signage networks.”
ScreenScape’s set-up has always enabled seemingly unrelated networks to share content – so an auto repair company could run car insurance tips from an insurance firm that also runs on ScreenScape. But there wasn’t any visibility over that. The new Control set-up means network operators can securely monitor and verify the integrity of content playback devices in the field – even when it’s not their own equipment.
Haven’t seen that before.
“Smart, granular device management and monitoring capabilities are becoming mandatory for the mass scale digital signage networks run by Fortune 500 companies,” explains ScreenScape CEO Mark Hemphill. “They can be very elaborate, expensive and difficult to scale. What we’ve done is democratized that, and made those same kinds of tools available to any ScreenScape client, whether they run a network of five screens or 5,000.”
ScreenScape hired an ex-BlackBerry senior engineer as its CTO in Jan. 2013 and he’s been driving the company to get increasingly enterprise-grade in terms of architecture and capabilities.