Hi folks,
have been on the road a lot in the past weeks and talked to a many people from all around the world. I had lot of great and inspiring discussions and often I was asked where the oxygen journey is going to. There was so much buzz about our Oxygen.next service out there and with our open API we took another step that many of you don’t understand. So let me tell u what it’s all about and what’s the strategy behind all this.
When we once started to develop our Oxygen media platform we wanted to enable everybody to make use of the possibilities of this media. Our first clients started to give us feedback and feature wishes and we implemented them. Product development has always been highly customer feedback driven and that made us very successful over the years.
But as most of you know digital signage can be used in incredibly many ways. So one day we found out that we had too many features! Our software simply became oversized for a lot of customers with only simple needs!
Nothing easier than that you might say…just throw away some features and there you go…or hire a UI designer to clean up your messy frontend 
As you might guess…it’s not! It turned out that most customers had simple needs – but these were all different! So how to deal with that!?
“Customization” is the key!
Ok, great….so how to achive that? I’ll tell you:
First step was to open the product so that everybody could make use of it….that’s why we launched Oxygen.next, our free digital signage service. Now everybody could benefit from the possibilities of digital signage – without boundaries!
Next step was to open the platform to developers….and here the API enters the game. It allows customers to make use of our feature-rich digital signage backend and focus on the customers needs like integration into existing software platforms ( CRM, CMS, ERP, etc) or to build custom UIs.
Third step: an application server! While the API allows developers to make use of our platform and don’t have to invent the wheel twice, there’s still much work to do on the UI side…building an app based on the API only still means to build a whole UI. That’s a lot of work (that’ll cost a lot of money and time)…you need to develop login routines, user rights management, etc.
So we are coming up with a more modular approach…an application server that allows you to just remove existing modules, change them and add new ones….depending on your customers’ needs!
I hope you can see the shapes of our vision more clearly now…we allow partners and customers to customize the UI according to their needs, so users will only get to see what they should! Great…isn’t it 
Best wishes
Matthias