The Eight Pillars of Scala

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Scala ConferenceTeatro alla Scala in Milan is one of Europe’s famous venues for performing dramatic opera. The International Scala Conference, a digital signage lovefest, brought some theatre of its own to its annual conference in Netherlands.

In front of 300 attendees from 45 countries, Scala wasted no time in playing out its biggest scene: CEO Gerard Bucas will retire and Tom Nix becomes the man in charge of digital signage’s largest software platform.

That change at Scala’s helm caught many offguard and probably overshadowed the real drama, the real opera that is playing out in the digital signage market where Scala is a major actor.

The “theatre playbill” that outlines this drama is a slide from their Scala presentation at the conference: the Eight Pillars of Scala strategy. Where goes Scala, there goes the industry…which is what makes these eight “pillars.”


8 Pillars

Scala is at its peak to-date with the first half of 2011 recording the highest revenue ever. Recession? What recession as Scala showed 65% growth in August this year versus last year. EMEA is up 21% this year so far (and the Scala “EMEA” designation does not include the Nordics.)

Driving the EMEA growth are about 150 partners, with 50 doing the bulk of the business. Oscar Elizaga, VP EMEA, India & Latin America , runs EMEA and like many executives in the business and in Scala, he believes this year is THE YEAR, the year that digital signage comes of age.

“The two indicators we see,” says Elizaga, “are the globalization of projects and a shift by our clients from I’ll-buy-all-the-different-pieces-and-do-it-myself to a new you-do-it-all attitude. We’re past the chasm and up the slope.”

But that slope can be a slippery stage.

If you read carefully the Eight Pillars, you get an idea of what’s in store for Tom Nix as the new Scala CEO and for Oscar Elizaga as VP EMEA. Call it “expand,” “push,” “widen,” “open,” “exploit” or even “M&A” but by whatever name it all adds up to the same point…the Eight Pillars hold up a roof on the Scala house that needs to get bigger and bigger as the digital signage market grows.

You are playing to a wider audience. In this Teatro alla Scala of digital signage, the protagonist watches the market grow and grow and then split into segments. The House of Scala must follow that segmentation (by creating new products for new segments) or lose its royal share.

Scala SeriesIf there were only one, two or three big antagonists that Scala faces, it might actually be easier to dominate the stage. But the real antagonist, the real competition is The Horde.

Digital signage for years has been the wanna-be industry held back by lack of standards and lack of big players. This left room for a lot of “bit players” to mount the stage, for the local software companies to launch their own digital signage scripts.

The digital signage market’s growing and so therefore is The Horde. Enter from stage right, the Intel and the Hewlett-Packard and we can see finally some stars of stage and screen on the digital signage stage. With their money and commercial power, with partners that dominate their own theatres in IT, Scala adds a couple of key supporting roles that might one day inject standards and the commercial structure that big companies bring to their performance.

In the meantime, how do you fight The Horde? We ask this of Oscar Elizaga…it’s the end of his long, tiring performance at the conference. He tells us that one of the reasons Scala holds its partner conference is to inspire and empower partners. “We need our partners to talk to one another and to partner with each other so they can do more business,” explains Elizaga.Oscar Elizaga

As we walked back and entered the main conference hall, Elizaga gazed over the partner exhibits, taking in the full room of the 2011 partner conference. He then answered our question with more questions: “How do you find more partners? How do you find the right partners? How do you get the partners you have now to do more?”

The Scala EMEA executive paused, as if to reflect on his own questions, then shook our hand and moved off, deep into his crowd of partners.

In those three questions, he defines the way you fight The Horde. You add more resources; you add more feet on the ground. You better arm and better train the cast of partners you have now. And you bring even more partners onto your stage for your Second Act.

In Teatro alla Scala, come sempre, the quality of the performance is always down to the quality of the people on stage.

Go Scala company and products

Go Scala’s new CEO