“ICE 2016 will see Advantech-Innocore showing the largest number of new products we have ever brought to the show”

What products are you presenting at the upcoming ICE show? Are you debuting any new products specifically designed for the European market?

ICE 2016 will see Advantech showing the largest number of new products that we have ever brought to London for the show.  We will have two brand new board level products (DPX-S440, DPX-E250) and two system level products (DPX-E135 and DPX-S2440). 

Apart from these new gaming platforms we will also be showcasing a broad  selection of Advantech’s other products that are applicable to the gaming industry.  Products include industrial LCD touchcreen monitors with exciting innovations such as bezel-less touchscreens,  high brightness, remote management and vandal proof features.  And alongside our highly successful industrial flash(SQF) product line, we will also display industrial motherboards in many formats such as COM Express, Mini-ITX, Q7 and including CPU technologies from Intel, AMD and ARM (RISC).

The key products we are showing specifically for Europe are the DPX-E130 a complete platform tailored for the Italian market, and the DPX-E135 targeting low cost markets needing a high performance and low cost platform and including some special features for European markets such as secure precise realtime clock and specialized GPIO.

What will be the highlights of this year's edition of the London exhibition? What are your expectations for the show?

We expect the highlights will be catching up with our customers, discussing with them our next generation products and finding new prospective customers too.

What's your strategy to gain market share in Europe?

Advantech-Innocore has over the last 18 months strengthened our salesforce in Europe, streamlining the organization structure in order to bring even more focus to the gaming industry and customers all across Europe.  This added focus has already proved to be effective as we closed out 2015 with a record year for sales in Europe.  The combination of more focused sales structure as well as an unrivalled portfolio of products to address all segments of the market has taken our European sales to a new level.  That and our corporate structure with e.g. a European RMA center, European logistics and European based engineering is proven to be a compelling proposition; it will no doubt allow us to continue that momentum into 2016 and beyond.

What are the strengths of the European market and where do opportunities lie?

Unlike the markets in North America, Europe has not suffered the same consolidations over the last 10 years.  There remain many regional OEMs specialized in manufacturing games for their local markets.  This means that we find more potential customers in Europe.  Furthermore we find that customers tend to be very loyal.  We have a well established reputation as a  hardware supplier to European gaming OEMs and many have been using our products for over 10 years.  Our strong roadmap of (backward-)compatible products also protects the customers investment in R&D allowing them to move easily to our next generation product when the old product eventually reaches the end of its life or  they need more performance, lower cost or some technology enhancement that is available with the newer models.