Strategy CTOUCH and the advantages of modules


Last year, way before Covid-19 occupied every waking moment, AV News made the short trip to Eindhoven to visit CTOUCH’s HQ and to hear about their new product roadmap. What we found was a compa- ny full of ideas, innovative strategies and confidence. And then came the virus. CTOUCH’s Francois Barlinckhoff tells how the company has limited the impact of Covid-19 while forging ahead with the new mod- ular product strategy.


When the assorted crowd of distribution partners, systems integrators and journalists sat down in the CTouch warehouse to hear about the evolving CTOUCH product roadmap, not only did we learn about new iFPD models (kind of expect- ed), but a whole new product strategy (definitely un expect- ed). Here was a manufacturer of interactive displays not grab- bing every available euro at the outset, but evolving the solu- tion, and the customer spend, over time and in accordance with need.


Francois Barlinckhoff ex- plains why CTOUCH feels t Che need to be different to other manufacturers. He also describes customer reaction to Touch’s new way of specifying and buying a product: “Our partners and end customers find the new strategy refresh- ing. The good thing about the BRIX concept is that it's mod- ular. In other words, you pay only for what you use. You pay for what you want now, and you don't have to pay now for what you might need in the future.” “Right now, in this time and these


in circumstances, this


helps a lot. People suddenly have to think: ‘what do I need in my meeting room. Do I need A, B, or C? I don't know.’ So we say: OK. “You can choose this one for now - a BRIX Pro, for example. You can do your whiteboarding, and integrate your room booking. Later on, after six or eight months, you might say: ‘OK, I need video as well.’ No problem, the custom- er can upgrade BRIX modules, so he doesn't have to replace the whole display.” In


contrast, Barlinckhoff


points out, other manufactur- ers are making complete and possibly partially redundant displays. “If you have a range of complete displays, the cus- tomer has to pay a lot of mon- ey, but he doesn't necessarily know if he wants to use the


complete range of capabilities in every meeting room. What we say is: “OK, choose what- ever you want! Maybe you can start slow and then upgrade. So just pay for what you need now, and then add. In the cur- rent environment, the customer reactions to this has been very, very good.”


Growth


Barlinckhoff continues: “Also, because of MS Teams the mar- ket grows at 150 to 300 per- cent. The magic word is defi- nitely Teams. We see a lot a lot of demand for our dedicated Teams solutions and, so far, the response is overwhelmingly positive.”


But does the BRIX not make inventory management a night- mare, with the potential for dozens of different SKUs? Barlinckhoff: “Not at all. We have manufactured two world beating touchscreens. This is the starting point. The mod- ules can be used in any of these screens. SO if anything we have streamlined our port- folio, whilst also simplifying it immenslyy.” Local assembly in CTouch’s home country of the Netherlands means that engi- neering support and lead times are reasonable.


But just how fundamental can the upgrades be – do they extend, for example, to the glass (CTouch offers a choice of its own proprietary technol- ogy or FlatFrog)? Barlinckhoff: “Customers rarely understand the whole technology. So, what we've


made is two displays. One is based on Android. The other one doesn't have any OS in- side. What we saw, and what we have learned is that big corporates are saying: “I don't want Android because of secu- rity. I want to have just a touch screen, a touch display without Android, so it's secure for my system. I want to have Office


CTouch previews the coloured bezels launching later this year.


Francois Barlinckhoff: “I think everyone now understands how import- ant the Education sector is. On top of that, we have worldwide growth in the corporate market, which is growing massively and because of Coronavirus.”


went into the lockdown they didn't have so much interactive technology in place. And corre-


ers. Barlinckhoff is naturally frustrated: “I'm very involved with sales. After a month or two months of lockdown, I was missing people. But now I'm doing a lot of training, demos, et cetera, with customers, at their customer sites, and it's always good to see each other. Of course, you can do it online, but it's the human, face-to- face factor you miss. It's the small talk around the coffee machine, or a chat about last nights game over lunch. Thank- fully we invested, just before the Coronavirus, in a training room. The room has state-of- the-art technology so we can deliver professional training courses online. It also allows us to deliver product demonstra- tions all over the world with 25 participants.”


The new training facility is a result of a partnership that CTOUCH have with Kinley in


P12 AV News November 2019 P8 AV News August 2020


365 on it. And of course, the writing functionality has to be brilliant!”


“And that's why we added the Flat Frog technology in one of our screens and TrueBeam Technology in another. It's not that everybody's asking, ‘Can I have the FlatFrog technology’ - the end-user generally doesn’t know enough to ask for that. We say to the end-user, ‘It doesn't matter. Choose your BRIX and choose your layer. Do you want to have Android? If not, that's fine with me!” CTOUCH is one of the few manufacturers of collabora- tive technology to maintain a strong position in the educa- tion sector – why is this import- ant? Barlinckhoff: “We have a market penetration of 80, 90 percent of Dutch education displays. But if you look, for example, to Germany, France, Spain, these countries are a way of these kinds of numbers. When Germany,


for example,


spondingly, they didn’t have so much content. So they had to send the students home, with some print outs, and no online things. The whole infrastruc- ture of I.T. was not there! We are seeing massive growth in these countries” “So suddenly, we get all of


kinds tenders happening.


4000 here, 5000 here - and so it’s growing fast. So we have maintained a strong position. Education has always been of the upmost importance to us. I think everyone now under- stands how important the Edu- cation sector is. On top of that, we have worldwide growth in the corporate market, which is growing massively and because of Coronavirus.”


Communications


This time of intense market activity is exactly the time when CTOUCH would want to be in touch with its custom-


Francois Barlinckhoff: “There are thirty-two million huddle spaces in the world. Only 12 percent is currently equipped with video. Only 12 percent, so there's a huge way to go. That's very good news for us.”


the Netherlands. Barlinckhoff: “It means that we can reach out to resellers. We've been doing live demos to resellers and end-users throughout lockdown. It’s meant that we haven't lost that human touch completely. Plus, we've still been able to send screens out to customers – whilst, we've all got screens at home.”


Sales in lockdown


So despite the restrictions on travel, events and even one-to- one presentations, introducing the new CTOUCH concept to the international market re- quires some special character- istics and skills in those tasked with selling. Barlinckhoff: “We know that corporate sales are very different to education. It's very much a solution cell for corporate products. And you really need to understand the customer requirements, their I.T. infrastructure and setup. And to do that, we have to find the right resellers. So when we're rolling the BRIX con- cept out in the UK, which will be over the next two or three months, we will be actively looking for those resellers to become accredited to sell these new solutions.”


“They obviously have to pos- sess in depth integration expe- rience, particularly experience with Office 365/ Teams inte- gration, because we want to en- sure that the end-users get the very best experience from the installation of our products. So, it's early days in the UK, but as I mentioned, we are actively seeking a reseller base which has this knowledge.”


And the corporate sector – also going through funda- mental change? Change is not just a function of Coronavirus: Barlinckhoff: “No, I think this has been happening for a cou- ple of years. Everybody was saying, yeah, ‘you can work at home’ but nobody was actually doing it. Everybody was driving to the office and then working from 9:00 to 5:00 and then driving back. Now, suddenly, we are forced to do that to work at home. And now a lot of peo- ple have realised: ‘Oh, it really


works’. On a corporate scale a lot of companies are saying: “I have two thousand employees, let's do a thousand at home and a thousand in the office. It saves me a lot of money, increases productivity, and it works.”


Future prospects


So you believe that the current growth in the corporate sector will be sustained? Barlinckhoff: “There are thirty two million huddle spaces in the world. Only 12 percent is currently equipped with video. Only 12 percent, so there's a huge way to go. That's very good news for us.”


But CTOUCH’s innovations don’t stop at the new features described above. Another intro- duction in Eindhoven last year was a range of coloured bezels that will undoubtedly make the company’s technology stand out from an almost universal sea of black, with the occasion- al cream and a red. If colour leaves you cold, the addition of new technical features, partic- ularly software, just might float your boat.


Here CTOUCH has chosen to partner with those who spe- cialise in the development of suitable products. Barlinckhoff explains why: “The thing is about software is that it chang- es every day - so fast. So you need a team of maybe 50 peo- ple constantly working on it ev- ery day. That's that's very, very expensive. If you have the right partners, then it is not neces- sary. For example, we can never beat Microsoft at software de- velopment -we can never make a Teams alternative ourselves. The only thing we can do is work with them. So we do. Oth- erwise, if we are starting now, today with 50 people making our own software, it takes us like five years. It takes us like maybe 50 years to be as good as Teams. So you have to have the right partners, and we are very fortunate in that respect!” So, look out for solutions de- veloped in


partnership. Look


out for colour coded bezels in October (for the first one) – Coronavirus willing.


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