Fergal Ó Ceallaigh, Ryarc

The 16:9 PODCAST IS SPONSORED BY SCREENFEED – DIGITAL SIGNAGE CONTENT I have been aware, forever, of an Australian digital signage software company called Ryarc, but through the years - and maybe a little because of the distances - I've never met or chatted with its founder and CEO Fergal Ó Ceallaigh. It's one of those submarine companies that kind of operates below the waterline and mostly out of sight, but Ryarc has been around for many, many years - and has done well despite its admitted marketing deficiencies, because the software is all about substance rather than sizzle. That has appealed to the IT people who get involved more and more these days in scaled screen projects. I was reminded of Ryarc during InfoComm, when an industry friend mentioned on a panel a technology he'd come across that would and could use broadcasting technology to move around digital signage content, instead of broadband internet or  mobile data networks. That sounded interesting, and I wanted to know more - as it sounded like satellite content distribution, but different. When I found out Ryarc was the company that was doing proof of concept trials in the U.S., I reached out to Fergal - now based in Seattle - and we had this chat. Subscribe from wherever you pick up new podcasts. TRANSCRIPT Fergal, thank you for joining me. I've been aware of your company for a long time, but we've never actually spoken. For those people who don't know what you do, what the company does. Could you give me the elevator pitch?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Thanks for inviting me on. RYARC was founded as a digital signage application, with the starting point of their need for a digital signage platform that combined enterprise capabilities with knowledge worker-level skills by the operator. So this was in an era when digital signage was moving from what was a highly specialized and fairly rare thing, to something where at least from our perspective, the requirement was going to be that digital signage was just going to be another tool in the armory of an enterprise and, as such, it would require rather than a specialized team to operate at a knowledge worker level.  This goes back 20 years, right?  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: Yeah, it does. We divert a little bit into kind of my backstory. I worked for Microsoft in the 90s in Dublin and I had a fantastic time there. It was Microsoft where the Nvidia of the day, Windows 95 was coming out. So it was a fantastic place to work, and I couldn't have asked for a better start in my career, but I had an itch to try and start something of my own, and I happened upon digital signage. I could see the way trajectories were going in terms of connectivity. If you combine connectivity, availability, and cost & display, availability, and cost, two lines on a graph are going down and to the right and human labor is going up, and to the right. So those three factors combined to make it apparent to me that digital signage was going to be a thing. If it was going to be a thing, it needed software to go with it. So I quit Microsoft, and I did my Asian Odyssey backpack and thing, and I was actually writing the code for version one. I got so bored sitting on the beach in Thailand that I took to actually writing code. I'm serious. That is dysfunctional.  Fergal Ó Ceallaigh: I guess. Yeah, it was extraordinary. I'm not a beach guy, which is, another strange story for someone who ended up in Sydney for as long as he did, but, yeah, so it was with that desire to have a go with that.  Coming out of Microsoft, I felt I had a decent handle on usability and what's needed for a knowledge worker-level software product, by which I mean a product that it became. It seemed obvious to me that digital signage was going to become a bigger thing and as a result, it needed to be a kind of a productivity-type app rather than some highly specialized thing that you'd need a broadcast engineer. I think the early software that was available did come out of broadc