Jose Behar, Zynchro

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

Every so often I'll get a call or email from an industry friend asking me about a software company called Zynchro, because they were in the mix, or the incumbent, on some sort of deal that was in play.

Yes, I'd say. I've heard of them. But that was about it.

Well, that's changed, as I had a good chat recently with Jose Behar, one of the two brothers who founded the company some 30 years ago. Zynchro has very quietly built up a nice book of business, mostly in the United States, with SaaS software marketed on the basis of flexibility, rock-solid reliability and low annual costs.

By its own admission, the Dallas-based company operates very quietly. But the installed base is north of 50,000 devices, many of them involving a couple of giant global brands. Like most whale clients, Zynchro can't quite say who those are ... but have a listen, and it becomes fairly obvious.

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TRANSCRIPT

Jose, thank you for joining me. I have heard about Zynchro, but we've never met, at least, I don't think so, and while I've heard about the company, I don't know a lot about it, and you're one of those companies that seems to be very active, quite successful, but kinda an old World War II submarine. You're running silent and deep. 

Jose Behar: Yes, we were silent for a long time. Even when my brother and I started a company 30 years ago, we started doing multimedia and CGI animation, and one of our ways to do business was to keep networking, being a little bit silent on the media, but having a lot of reputation among client to client, mouth to mouth. 

So if I bumped into you in an elevator, and I'm not in this business and asked, oh, what do you do? What does your company do? What would you tell them? 

Jose Behar: Zynchro is a digital signage platform SaaS, software as a service. So, our clients can use Zynchro for different kinds of applications and in a lot of vertical markets. Zynchro is not only a content manager. Maybe a lot of our clients, or the people that hear about us, look at us as content managers, but we have different modules. We now have four modules, and we are developing two more for health monitoring for all the players in the network. Also, analytics, all kinds of different analytics for interactive and non-interactive presentations. Of course, the content management, and we also have the campaign module. The campaign module is the monetizing area. 

One of our biggest clients is one the biggest retailers in the market. They are using this campaign module, and you can see different media and articles saying that they are making billions of dollars using their digital signage. and now all the stores and all their home office and some distribution centers are using our software to communicate and to control their digital signage. 

So the campaign manager is basically enabling a retail media network?

Jose Behar: That's right. The idea is creating a TV network where our clients can sell their advertising spaces, and they can have all the inventory and all the reports that they need in order to show their clients all the information. 

There are a hell of a lot of companies out there that do what you do. You've been at it for a very long time, three decades. What is it about what you do that differentiates it from the scores of other companies who have a pretty similar offer. Everybody has their unique aspects to it, but what is it about yours?

Jose Behar: We don't use other hardware or software APIs. For example, one of the players that we use is BrightSign, and we know all the insights of the player. We are able to be a standalone. We don't need their software to be useful. 

Another thing is that we are the owners of the intellectual property, and we develop everything completely. So our clients are able to ask us for different kinds of customizations, all kinds of customizations we have done with all of our clients, and connect directly to their systems or allow different kinds of peripherals. For example, right now, we were selected by Sony Semiconductor to integrate their AI camera Aitrios into our software as almost a plug and play. We are now the only software that can manage that and use that camera in digital signage without any additional development. 

So for BrightSign and for Sony as well, when you talk about not really relying on APIs and things like that, do you have your own specific operating system instead of working with BrightSign OS, or how does all that work? 

Jose Behar: In the case of BrightSign, we don't have an operating system because they have their own, but we