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 yo