Strategy & Best Practices

When Software and Hardware Equal Digital Transformation Success

By Ideas @ AppDirect / Jul 24, 2018

By now, digital transformation has been around long enough that it has gone from concept to actionable business strategy. With this maturity, businesses across a range of industries are now reporting the success (or failure) of their digital transformation initiatives.

One of these success stories is Clevertouch, a leading provider of interactive displays based in the United Kingdom. The company offers touchscreen devices and software to business and education customers in the UK and overseas.

While Clevertouch had seen success selling its displays, Rob Xenos, the company’s software development manager, knew that a digital business model could take Clevertouch to the next level. As he explained in a blog post, “teachers need to innovate, and many are turning to digital means to bridge the financial gap. … We see a big shift away from pen and paper teaching towards a purely digital learning environment.”

To this end, the company launched its Cleverstore in 2015. The Cleverstore is a free educational app store that is integrated with the company’s Plus Series displays. The Cleverstore offers more than 100 apps for schoolchildren of all ages.

According to Xenos, the Cleverstore solved many challenges that teachers were facing as they tried to bring digital technology into the classroom. “The main reason we built an app store on our device was that, although teachers wanted to use apps as a teaching aid, they weren’t able to because of a lack of access to the best apps.”

"We built an app store on our device because teachers wanted to use apps in the classroom but couldn't access the best apps."

The Cleverstore has also served to connect developers to teachers and students to create a better learning experience. Since the launch of the app store, “we are in constant talks with the top education app developers and teachers to ensure we add new apps and content that is curriculum-specific, as well as being advert and in-app purchase free,” Xenos said.

From a technical and product standpoint, the Cleverstore is thriving because it offers a best-in-class digital experience paired with hardware. The app store provides a developer center that makes it easy for developers to integrate new apps, and offers tools that enable Clevertouch to centralize all of the apps into a curated showcase. Features like these enable Clevertouch to drive ongoing evolution of its platform.

Clevertouch is just one example of hardware manufacturers embracing digital products and services to enhance their devices—and their competitive advantage. To learn more about how AppDirect helped power the digital transformation success of Clevertouch, download the case study.

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