Rebranding for Econocom ProAV business

The French Econocom group is one of Europe’s largest IT systems integrators, with sales of 2.8 billion euros. Econocom brands itself as Europe’s leading digital general contractor. Until now, the IT service business is based on three pillars: Workplace, Infrastructure and Finance (even including its own banking license). While the pan-European organization is providing a wide range of ProAV and digital signage services for more than ten years, it has been just one of many non-core solutions.

With the launch of the Gather brand, Econocom now establishes Audiovisual as a stand-alone fourth strategic pillar. The aim is to quickly achieve European market leadership under the new brand “Gather with Econocom”.

“Solution provider with ProAV and digital signage in its DNA”

For many years, Econocom has been providing digital signage solutions to clients mainly in Spain and the BeNeLux, in other markets mainly as a distributor. Econocom become a leading digital signage SI with the acquisitions of Altabox (Spain) and BIS (BeNeLux).

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The new Gather unit includes the Belgian integrator BIS|econocom, the French integrator Exaprobe | econocom and various ProAV experts from the entire 11,000-staff Econocom organization mainly in France, Spain and Italy.

“We want to become Europe’s leading digital signage solution provider”

invidis met with Econocom senior management at the eve of the launch of “Gather with Econocom”. The unit is managed by Gather director Jean Pierre Overbeek and Econocom Deputy Managing Director Israel Garcia – both very experienced digital signage experts: Overbeek has been running the Belgian integrator BIS for 25 years while Garcia founded Altabox – both companies are subsidiaries of Econocom today.

According to Jean Pierre Overbeek, Econocom’s new Gather brand identity was developed “in particular to achieve greater visibility in Europe’s largest digital signage markets”. Outside of Econocom’s home markets, the company is hardly known as a digital signage provider, therefore not sufficiently invited to tenders and lacking market share.

Hidden champion with annual sales of EUR 220 million

With 6,500 ProAV and digital signage installations in 95 countries annually, Gather is already one of Europe’s leading AV general contractors – a volume of projects only Trison can keep up with. Gather has its own offices in 16 countries. The annual turnover of 220 million euros is split roughly half between collaboration solutions and experiences (digital signage). Consolidated sales are expected to almost double to over 400 million euros by 2028 via organic growth and acquisitions especially in Europe’s largest markets.

Germany has been identified as one of the most important growth markets for the entire Econocom Group. Across all four pillars sales in Germany are forecasted to grow 300 million euros from currently 240 million euros to more than half a billion. Besides Germany Econocom has also identified the UK as one of the future growth markets.

CMS independent despite offering an inhouse CMS platform

“Gather with Econocom” wants to remain independent when it comes to CMS platforms. “We are currently working with Telelogos, NDS Pads and Scala, but we are guided by our customers,” said Israel Garcia in an interview with invidis. “Our advantage are 75 in-house software developers adapting digital signage CMS platforms to the needs of customers and developing and maintaining APIs to relevant IT platforms such as ERP, CRM, DAM.”

But Econocom also offers its own CMS platform, originally a legacy of its Altabox acquisition. But in the last three years, the legacy platform was replaced by a brand-new “Econocom RealDooH”. The new SaaS-based digital signage platform is built on a modern and secure architecture. Currently the inhouse platforms runs already on around 5,000 digital signage devices.

“The Gather brand was designed to gain visibility in the largest markets”

Bundling AV activities in a separate business unit with its own brand image is intended to strengthen visibility and the digital signage profile in the market. “IT integrators generally lack ProAV and digital signage specific know-how. Gather in contrast has the necessary ProAV DNA. And the newly formed independent business unit should make this visible to the market. We are not an IT specialist that also offers digital signage, but rather one of Europe’s leading ProAV specialists.”

In order to quickly increase visibility, Econocom will rebrand all subsidiaries and business units with the new Gather branding.