01732 759725 22 Q&A With Andy Haywood, Head of Global Sales Europe at Samsung European Displays Organisation “Every sector has its own vertical needs, but the products themselves are designed to be flexible,” explains Haywood. “A 24/7 passenger information display in an airport would need to be a certain brightness because the ambient lighting is controlled. Move into the corporate sector, and the same displays in a meeting room won’t be run at the same brightness; they’ll be turned down from say 700 nits to 500 nits to prolong the life of the display and to improve return on investment. Everybody approaches things in a slightly different way.” In order to meet diverse customer requirements, Haywood says Samsung relies on channel partners that have indepth knowledge of their customers, as well as expertise in display technologies. “The channel is immensely important. We only go to market through our channel, through distribution and through resellers and integrators. Partners range from small specialist integrators that provide a very personalised service and don’t just work with SMBs but also with major corporates and multinationals, through to multinational resellers that are able to provide consistency of product delivery to large enterprises around the world. There is a need for all sorts of resellers with different skill sets and capabilities.” Haywood adds that the relationship between resellers/integrators and end user customers is starting to change with the growth of managed services and the emergence of new ways of buying technology. “That is evolving quite significantly now. Some of the system integrators, particularly the larger ones, have their own leasing companies behind them, while others will come to us or a third party. In the UK, there’s a Samsung business unit called Samsung Finance that is there to help customers and reseller partners to deploy displays as a service. Subject to certain criteria, we can do almost any project. “It’s not just a case of financial support. It also involves putting in place a refresh programme, allowing for enhancements to technology and considering other aspects. Sometimes that’s just a case of looking at how we introduce MagicINFO, which is our CMS platform for data management, but we try to be as flexible as possible because if COVID has taught us one thing it is that you can never take anything for granted. We don’t know what’s coming next. We think we’ve returned to stability and suddenly an international conflict occurs which changes things again. So we have to be adaptable.” To find out more about the challenges and the opportunities facing Samsung’s display business and its reseller partners, Technology Reseller asked Andy Haywood about key market trends over the last 12 to 24 months. Technology Reseller (TR): What are some of the key growth areas at the moment? Andy Haywood (AH): Some of the most interesting trends to have emerged since COVID are things like virtual studios and virtual production, so reducing the need to have multiple people in one location to produce something, whether that’s one of the recent Star Wars movies, if you’re doing big screen, or product advertising. Visual production facilities have enhanced and improved so much that there’s no longer the need to rent enormously expensive studios. That’s been a really interesting development. Another area of growth is command and control, as everybody becomes more aware of the capabilities of command and control and it’s no longer seen as just a security piece. LED in those environments is increasing significantly, large format displays and then either professional desktop Samsung’s professional displays division addresses more than 80% of the total display market by focusing on nine different verticals – corporate, retail, transportation, education, quick service restaurants (QSR), digital out of home (e.g. sports arenas, entertainment venues and museums), manufacturing, hotels and healthcare – meeting customer needs with its standard product range and some sector-specific solutions, in medical for example. Overall, its product range extends from semi-professional products for the SOHO and SMB sectors all the way through to high-end, professional displays designed to run 24/7 at high brightness, with display sizes stretching from 19in desktop monitors up to 98-inch professional displays, plus a range of software solutions built around Samsung’s Tizen platform. “In every vertical there are overlaps rather than gaps, so we can meet all customer requirements that I’m aware of right now,” claims Andy Haywood, Head of Global Sales Europe at Samsung European Displays Organisation. This is quite some feat considering the variety of applications and multiple subcategories you might find in each vertical, such as campus wayfinding, boardroom displays and collaboration solutions in the corporate sector and wayfinding, out of home and retail advertising, command and control rooms and passenger information displays in airports. Q&A Andy Haywood
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