If 2025 taught us anything, it’s that enterprise digital signage has finally outgrown its reputation as “just screens.” We watched enterprises stop treating it like an IT project and start treating it like business infrastructure that delivers measurable results.
At Skykit, we spent the year recalibrating our entire platform around this reality – serving three distinct enterprise needs: generating revenue through screen networks, enabling data-driven frontline decisions, and supporting deployments that scale to thousands of endpoints.
This shift is showing up in both the boardroom and the server room: enterprises are demanding clearer business returns and deeper technical accountability.
The Business Perspective | Irfan Khan, CEO
The biggest shift I saw in 2025 was how enterprise buyers approached us. They stopped
comparing feature checklists and started asking harder questions:
- What’s the payback period?
- How do we measure success?
- Can you show me a customer at our scale?
We responded by moving from one-and-done demos to a structured approach: proof of concept, pilot with defined success metrics, then scale. Longer sales cycles, but dramatically better outcomes.
Those harder questions signaled another growing trend. For years, the industry talked about signage moving from cost center to revenue driver. In 2025, I finally saw real evidence. Healthcare networks, retail chains, and transit operators are monetizing screens through
programmatic advertising – treating displays as revenue inventory with clear ROI expectations. Customers now show up with business cases, not just budgets.
We also saw a new category of partnership emerge: software platforms looking to extend their products into physical screens.
These companies already have strong SaaS offerings, but have realized their customers need a complete software and hardware solution – and lack the infrastructure to support physical deployments. They’re partnering with Skykit to handle the infrastructure layer through API integration: we manage device logistics, firmware security, and support, while they maintain the customer relationship and software experience.
It’s proof that the market is moving beyond fragmented approaches toward integrated solutions.
The Technical Perspective | Paul Lundberg, CTO
For years, the industry pushed “hardware-agnostic” as a feature. In 2025, enterprises realized that model creates accountability gaps.
Here’s why: when something breaks at 3am, they need to fix it fast. But in a fragmented system, the CMS vendor blames the hardware, the hardware vendor blames the OS, and nobody owns the problem. Worse, if you don’t control the firmware layer, you can’t remotely diagnose issues, push updates, or rebuild devices. At 500 screens across 50 locations, that’s unsustainable.
This is why full-stack control matters. At Skykit, we control the hardware, firmware, edge
software, and cloud platform. When something goes wrong, we trace the issue through every layer and fix it. No vendor coordination, no blame game. It’s the difference between spending
hours on a conference call trying to figure out who’s responsible versus logging in, identifying the root cause, and pushing a fix.
Security requirements also evolved. Enterprise teams stopped asking “Is your app secure?” and started asking, “Is the entire stack secure?”
They want hardened firmware, documented OS update controls, and proof that their signage network won’t become a backdoor into their corporate environment. SOC 2 is now baseline – the real differentiator is demonstrating chain-of-custody from firmware to cloud.
The fastest-growing technical request was secure data integration. Customers want live business data on screens: production dashboards on factory floors, CRM metrics in sales offices. That means enterprise authentication, complex rendering on headless devices, and treating screens as active endpoints in the data workflow, not just content displays.
Looking Ahead to 2026
The big opportunity we see is signage converging with enterprise infrastructure. Screens are becoming data endpoints, not standalone systems. This favors platforms over point solutions, and we expect consolidation as customers move away from vendors that can’t scale with them.
We’re investing in autonomous network management – devices that monitor their own health, detect problems before failures, and fix themselves without human intervention. At enterprise scale, even remote manual troubleshooting becomes difficult to sustain.
We’re also betting on network independence. As displays move into critical operational roles, enterprises want dedicated 4G/5G connectivity that bypasses their corporate LAN entirely. IT security teams love this because it eliminates a whole category of risk.
Our Advice for Your Next Deployment
Buy for “Day Two,” not “Day One.” Anyone can display an image today. The hard part is pushing a security patch to 500 devices six months later, or remotely fixing a failed player without sending a technician.
Ask vendors tough questions: Who controls every layer of the solution? What happens when
things break at scale? Can this grow from hundreds to tens of thousands of endpoints while
remaining stable?
Start with your business outcomes – revenue, efficiency, better decisions – and work backward to platform requirements. The enterprises that figured this out in 2025 understood that managing the operating system is just as important as managing the content.
The companies positioning themselves to win in 2026 are picking partners with proven track records at Fortune 500 scale. When you’re betting operations or revenue on a screen network, that experience matters.
An edited version of this article was originally published on Sixteen:Nine on January 15, 2026.
Want to Go Deeper? Join Our Live Webinar!
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