At ISE 2026 in Barcelona, Inavate EMEA editor Paul Miligan sat down with James Keen, Uniguest’s EVP Marketing, to explore the company’s evolution through strategic acquisitions, and talk about a new partner program aimed at enhancing collaboration and growth in digital signage, IPTV, and more.
How has consolidation shaped Uniguest into the company it is today?
We’ve been around for 40 years, we were originally a print provider producing directories and menus in hotel rooms and the company has expanded through acquisition largely. We’ve bought a number of businesses over the years and brought them together. It forced us in a number of directions that 10 or 20 years ago the company would never have thought it would move in, such as digital signage and IPTV, interactive hotel TV systems, engagement apps for senior living residents. We’ve had to embrace a lot of change within the business, whether that’s systemic or whether that’s our route to market, whether that’s in technology and development.
We’ve really had to take on a number of personas simultaneously to deliver value to our customers and whoever they are. The consolidation of all of that isn’t easy. We think at the end of it we’ve come out as a unified entity that can cater to individual needs and individual requirements and we can be a chameleon within the technology space where we have something that fits regardless of where you are.
TO WATCH THE VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH JAMES KEEN, CLICK HERE
How do you merge different businesses together and keep the same culture?
I don’t think you can keep the same culture. Your new culture becomes an amalgamation, and you set a central set of goals, objectives and values as a business. Our HR team is really strong on positioning values and preaching values to the leaders in the business to make sure that filters through. From that perspective, you can try and keep a level of control over the culture, but you have to accept that it’s a global business as well. A lot of the businesses we’ve acquired have been quite small. There’s a very different mentality in a small business versus a large corporate.
There’s a very different mentality in the United States compared to Norway or Dubai. You have to accept there’s going to be those cultural nuances. That nuance becomes your culture because you have to embrace it and use it to your advantage. The team in the Middle East are never going to operate in the same way as the team in the UK. But that means that if we allow them to run things a little bit differently, then we’ll have a better performance in that region because they understand the culture there.
Uniguest is 40 years old, yet in 2018 it had installed zero digital signs, now that number is around 1 million. That’s quite a jump isn’t it?
It’s an extraordinary jump, obviously some of that is through acquisition. It’s been a quite incredible rise really when you consider how little brand equity and knowledge there is of Uniguest in the market still to this day, it’s a quite significant number.
We bought Tripleplay, Mediastar, and Onelan, lots of businesses that did digital signage and each one of those brought an amount of signage endpoints and custom to the business. But still over the last five years we’ve been adding around 100,000 licenses a year and really accelerated our growth in the space. Our emergence has been a challenge because being a print provider is a very different challenge to serving digital signage clients, resellers, integrators, partners, and consultants to deliver complex digital signage projects, so it creates a lot of challenges but it’s something we’ve done really well and we’ve grown into nicely because we’ve adopted a number of experts in that field through acquisition that we’ve been able to continue providing the high level of service and continue that growth.
What were the most difficult parts of going from zero to 1 million digital licenses?
A lot of the challenges were operational and systemic. We’ve still got some legacy platforms in the field, so you’re offering multiple nuances on various software platforms that are still in use. It’s created a lot of operational complexity in the background. The more endpoints you have, the bigger that complexity becomes. If you have 1 million endpoints, let’s say that translates into 50,000 customers. They all have a nuance of what they want to do, and you have to try and help them with their specific challenges as well.
We try and have a very hands-on approach with our end-user; we run user groups and customer advisory boards where we talk directly to our customers and you try to understand their needs, but it means that you have got a million opinions, you’ve got a million use cases to talk through, and that creates a lot of complexity and a lot of challenge in terms of what you prioritise when it comes to your road map.. This is all the more important as we look to bring our brands together under a single Uniguest umbrella, consolidating technology, and ensuring 100% of R&D investment goes into the future state. Obviously, from a revenue perspective having a million endpoints is brilliant. It’s then about where do you focus engineering? There’s just so many voices in the mix because of who our customers are, and seeing a clear path forward.
You’ve made changes to the way Uniguest reaches the market, why?
In the past we used to sell direct to the hotel market, the senior living market, and healthcare. I have 25-years of working with the channel, and it can be a really powerful market to work in if you get the partnerships and the relationships right. It accelerates your ability to grow your brand in the market. It grows your reach through feet on the ground in terms of integrators and resellers who are positioning your technology in the reseller base, and the integration base adds a lot of value to the projects that we deliver.
They know technology we don’t know, they know how to make our digital signage come to life, whether that’s through a content strategy or through integration into other technologies and implementing the display that you need or the control systems and all of those things that we don’t.
We’re looking to launch a new partner program this year, to add features such as value incentive rebates back into the market, marketing support, channel partner resources through our partner portal, really trying to add some value back into the channel such as additional discounts to create that relationship to create the ‘push me pull you’ approach between us and them to help us both drive further in signage, further in IPTV, further in meeting room booking.
We’re heavily investing now because we’ve made a decision as a business this is the way we want to go and this is where we’re going to invest in the next 5/10/15+ years to really drive Uniguest as a brand and as a technology forward in the market.