ViewSonic Corp. wants resellers to help grow its digital signage business, launching a new digital signage program within its Finch Club partner program.
Sheridi Higa, channel marketing manager at ViewSonic, said any partner who’s interested in the digital signage space is welcome to enroll in the digital signage program by visiting www.finchclub.com.
“We’re looking to build our digital signage business, so the program is open to anyone who’s interested, or who’s already in this vertical market segment,” Higa said.
Gene Ornstead, director of DTV and business development at ViewSonic, said the new program includes resources and tools such as training, Webinars, sales incentives and demo offerings which are tailored to meet the needs of digital signage initiatives.
“Today, only about 10 per cent of our business is in digital signage,” Ornstead said. “We’re hoping to increase this by the end of the year to 20 per cent, minimum.”
Currently, the company has about 20,000 value-added resellers (VARs) in North America, with about 2,700 in Canada.
“I’d like to have a good couple thousand resellers in Canada that engage with and service this market,” Ornstead said. “We’ll also recruit new resellers into this space too.”
Ornstead explains that resellers are faced with difficulties and challenges in the digital signage space and may find themselves overwhelmed with everything that’s involved.
“Content is king and managing the content is an important area of selling digital signage,” he said. “Partners are asking how to manage and create content so it can be downloaded onto a server that then talks to the display.”
The digital signage partner program, under the Finch Club umbrella, will help partners solve some of these complex issues and questions. The goal of the program is to educate and train ViewSonic VARs on how to participate in this marketplace without being discouraged or frustrated, Ornstead explained.
Once engaged in the digital signage industry, Ornstead said partners can also leverage ViewSonic’s content creation reference partners.
“We can give VARs our reference partner recommendations for getting content created,” he said. “The goal is to make it easier for our VARs to get into this space and really understand it.”
Using ViewSonic’s DisplayIt 3.0 software, Ornstead says at the most basic level, those VARs who have a working knowledge of PowerPoint can easily start working in the digital signage space.
Some vertical markets where ViewSonic sees opportunities include education with digital signage helping with things such as emergency notifications, retail and other point of sale opportunities, transportation stations for signage and alerts and even corporate communications in front-office lobbies, Ornstead said.
ViewSonic’s first Webinar series for digital signage partners is slated for March 16 and 17 and will focus on the company’s digital signage products and the DisplayIt 3.0 software solution.
