Article

New Summit report finds continental gulf in adoption

Europe, once thought to be the leader in self-service deployment, is now in third place. What's going on?

February 26, 2006 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance

Summit Research Associates recently published the sixth edition of its flagship report, "Kiosks and Interactive Technology." This sprawling document, built from original research plus a survey sent to over 550 companies engaged in self-service technology, offers an optimistic view of self-service in the coming years.

"Happily, for most of the major players in this field, the difficult days of 2001-2003 are very much a thing of the past," reads the report's introduction. "The types of projects and number of installations have grown impressively. Even those organizations that tried kiosks and failed are coming back for another attempt to `get it right this time.' Similarly, those who had never attempted a kiosk venture are now actively pursuing a wide variety of projects."

Changes overseas

Francie Mendelsohn, president of Summit Research Associates, said that she was most surprised by the drop in self-service deployments in Europe.

"Europe used to be the leader, and is now in third place," she said in an interview. "They're by nature more cautious, even though the population is and was very quick to adopt self-service technology."

She pointed out that North America now has more kiosks deployed than the rest of the world combined.

"If you look at the statistics, the difference between the installed base in the U.S. and Europe is so different it's startling," she said. "I questioned it. So I went back and researched some more, but no, that's the reality. It's not like its dead, but they're just not deploying in the huge numbers."

According to the report, 439,000 units are deployed in North America, 157,000 in Asia-Pacific, and 129,000 in Europe.

One of the main causes for the drop in Europe's numbers was the change in plans by telecom giant BT, which had originally planned to roll out 28,000 Web/phone kiosks beginning in 2001. By January of 2006, the company scratched the project after installing only 1,300.

What the future holds

So where are the next growth opportunities? Photo kiosks still have plenty of room to grow, according to the report:

"Fifteen percent of all currently deployed units - more than 110,000 - are digital photography kiosks. In 2003, 14 percent of digital camera owners developed their prints at a kiosk in a retail location. Today that number is more than 35 percent and the trend shows no signs of weakening."

Retail, still the largest segment of the installed base at 34 percent, shows strong promise in product ordering (both in foodservice and at grocery stores) and self-checkout. The Summit report notes that even though self-checkout lanes can be expensive to deploy, ROI can usually be achieved within a year.

Other growing sectors include travel/tourism (led by airline and hotel check-in); financial services such as bill-payment; entertainment (with constant experimentation taking place in the burn-on-demand segment); transportation (car rental kiosks, rail ticketing); healthcare; and human resources.

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