Ooh-tv met with Omar Kezouit, who was appointed General manager for France & Africa at Scala in April.

Omar, for some people you are a new face in the market. Could you introduce yourself?

I’ve been working for over 20 years now in the software sector. After INRIA and R&D at Orange, I joined Oracle, in Project management, professional services, then sales positions. I left Oracle after 9 years, taking on growing sales management responsibilities with BMC-Remedy, Avaya, and Impleo.

Prior to joining Scala, I was Director for Southern Europe, Middle East & Africa at Fatwire, editor of a Web CMS solution enabling the publication of online content for large organisation portals and for eCommerce.

So I’m very familiar with the issues of content and technology-based communication and do foresee the evolutions of demand in the Digital Media Space. Re-Branding, boosting Sales, developing customer loyalty or motivating employees, are major drivers shaping demand.

What did you discover when joining the digital signage sector?

I thought that I was joining a niche market. Actually, the niche is quite large! Scala alone, has about 7000 customers around the world. Even though the niche still doesn’t know what to call itself: digital signage, OOH something or other, digital media… I prefer Digital Media because it emphasises the Media aspect in it. The sector is growing rapidly – more than 20% per year on a worldwide basis, according to certain sources.

In France, in Southern Europe and in Africa, demand is very strong, driven by the needs of corporate communications, branding, stimulating retail sales. Distribution, Banking and Franchises are very active sectors. A fascinating stream is the demand for giant outdoor screens or video walls, such as those deployed on skyscraper facades and in Malls. For example, Scala has been chosen for the giant LED screens mounted on tower blocks in The Hague, Dubai and Madrid. A few days ago, on Sept 15^th, videowalls using Scala were turned on at a Westfield Mall near London.

Nevertheless, the digital media industry needs to be a bit more structured in order to better promote itself, better identify each actor’s contribution, and engage in new initiatives which would accelerate and widen adoption by customers. That’s what we aim to achieve by our participation in the Digital Media Association France.

One thing is certain: demand is mature and Global companies, medium-size businesses and franchise operators are all picking up this new media. From our supplier’s side, majors players like Orange, Intel, Dell, HP, Accenture, etc.) are getting interested in Digital Media, and we are building partnerships with them.

Scala just organised its Partner Conference in Amsterdam – What were the major announcements?

They were of different types. At the opening of the conference, Scala announced Tom Nix as the new CEO. This is a strategic nomination, announced by outgoing CEO, Gerard Bucas, who remains on the Board. This nomination confirms that Scala is growing and maturing with the market and is preparing to meet our customers’ new needs. This is the same reason why I was chosen to manage Scala France and Africa.

On the product side, the major announcement was the release of our new software solution Scala 5 Release 6. It has three main improvements:

First of all, it improves support for High Definition video, and has improved capabilities for including live content.

Secondly, this new Release 6 has several new tools to make life easier for IT Managers, whether it be better network monitoring or a more precise management of the bandwidth (disabling player content uploading at certain times of the day, defining a maximum level for bandwidth, etc.).

And finally we have improved the content creation functions, including new effects for content designers.