Episode 1: China’s Influence on American Security Systems

…whether or not the deal is sold directly to the manufacturer. If you are a company or organization that has a thousand cameras or five thousand cameras this will be something that almost certainly, you’re going to have many manufacturers going indirectly and pitching the deal. Now they may say at the very end like okay I’m going to sell it through ADT or X Y Z or whoever the integrator is. That’s definitely when you see that across the board Axis and Avigilon you know pretty much all of them now at this point have sales people that are focused on calling and pitching end users. And I think that the boat is sort of passed on that. I think there are a bunch of integrators that are still kind of upset about that because of the question of control like who’s customer is it, is that my customer, is that your customer, both of our customers and almost certainly I think all the manufacturers have learned at this point that we’re not going to win these big deals unless our own people are going out making the case. Otherwise you’re banking that ADT or convergent or JCI or Siemens or whoever is going to go in and make the pitch for you. And the reality is right for most manufacturers they aren’t going to be pitching for the manufacturer. They may have one of the manufacturers they pitch for or they may be often integrated. You know whatever you think is best we’ll go with, right, we’re just there to service and support you.

So, I think more and more of that the internet makes it so that Verkada is a great example of where they’re moving this more down market. Certainly, a lot of these schools that Verkada is winning are thousands of cameras. So, it fits perfectly in that sort of model that like listen if you have a thousand cameras and I’m a manufacturer that’s a deal that’s big enough that I want to go after and have my own people directly involved. But I think you look at the Internet with webinars, email, newsletters, social media marketing and who does it right. It’s easier now than ever for manufacturers to directly communicate with end users, even end users that might only have a few hundred cameras. You know when we first got into the industry, I think a lot of it used to be like well I’m going to be in Houston for three weeks from now and I set up an appointment right. That was literally it. Because otherwise you do a phone call but it’s not very sort of useful just to do a phone call. And now obviously these things have changed. You know if I want to know in Houston who is the security manager operating in our facilities manager. Whatever it might be is pretty likely that I’m going to be able to find it on LinkedIn. That’s why you see so many sales people that are paying eighty-five dollars a month for LinkedIn premium whatever they call it.

So, you can have that type of intel and reach out to these people directly and then do webinars etcetera to sort of picture products directly. So, I see that you know more and more continuing and I think that’s you know to the detriment of the historical role or at least the historical role of what an integrator was where you know the integrator would figure these things out and bring it back to the end user. You’re seeing a lot more I think in general when talk about the Internet disintermediation right the inner the integrator is historically been the intermediary between the manufacturer and the end user and the Internet like it does from anything like real estate agents right. It enables basically people to connect directly or the buyer and seller correct directly without having to use real estate agent or the integrator as exclusively as the intermediate point.