One of the best attended educational sessions at the Electronic Security Expo (ESX) held June 23-27 in Nashville, Tenn., was “The RMR [recurring monthly revenue] of Everything.” Moderated by John Galante of AE Ventures, the seminar’s panel consisted of Chris Gilbert (Security Pros), Jay Kenny (Alarm.com), Joe Nuccio (ASG Security) and Michael Maniscalco (ihiji).

Speaking first, Kenny, a frequent contributor to Security Sales & Integration, talked about how the escalation of data points in the home (lights, flood sensors, energy control and the whole Internet of things concept) will open up evermore opportunities for security systems providers and monitoring concerns. “The complexity of the emerging connected home puts us, the security industry, in a great position to help those homeowners manage it all,” he said.

Maniscalco, who also participated in “The Residential Supersession” that was hosted by SSI and held later that day, discussed how the rising sophistication of networked and integrated devices and systems is paving the way for security integrators to offer service & maintenance agreements to their client bases. He recommends dealers charge 5%-8% of the installation price for such agreements. Maniscalco further advised attendees to deploy remote service capabilities for system troubleshooting, reboots, upgrades and more. Easily enabled by today’s software, this approach saves the provider time and money in not having to roll a truck to the customer site, and the customer receives faster response and less downtime.

Nuccio, an SSI Industry Hall of Famer and member of the publication’s editorial advisory board, is extremely dialed in to pursuing recurring revenue and in particular advocated video surveillance as a service (VSaaS) and fire systems services as rapidly growing opportunity segments. “If you can’t derive RMR from it, don’t install or sell it,” he said. “Home automation is a modern-day land grab and there is much opportunity at all levels.”

Gilbert closed the session out by presenting many of the findings from SSI‘s 2013 Installation Business Report to support his premise that the access control market is rife with ways for security providers to boost their RMR.

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