ONLINE EXCLUSIVE ROUNDTABLE: Security Managers Discuss Adopting New Technologies

Are you finding RFPs are actually including more of those things now?

Olivares: City of Tucson, there’s another one for city of Phoenix airports, a couple of regional airports. We didn’t get that project but it had the same specs, barcode on all their devices, and have to be able to log into a portal and view their status of service calls, parts ordered, status of a service call and if you had to order a special part that you were not stocking for them, they want to see where it’s at, when it’s coming in. That’s twice. One we got awarded and the other we didn’t win. That’s going to give us a learning process for more to come.

Will: We’re having an initiative in place to have that type of system in place for our remote techs by the end of the year. We think it’s going to force us to do our job better by creating transparency. We’re going to have to open the kimono and let the customers in to see everything. It’s going to force us to absolutely step our game up to be able to do that. We think that’s the biggest challenge of the whole process.

Bumgardner: I think from an end-user standpoint, the one thing we’ve observed, especially for the larger clients, is that there’s more and more CIOs and CEOs wanting their mobility device connected to the network, and not only connected to the network but they want connation to the intellectual property on the network. That’s where the problem comes in because the IT guys are going we can on-board you but it’s going to be on the guest network where it’s separated, and you can’t have access to anything. We know it’s secure. So as a security integrator we think this is a huge opportunity for our IT division to go and say we’re going to help you solve your problem but BYOD, bring your own device. We’re going to say if you bring an iPhone in, the network is going to recognize I’m an iPhone, I go over here. I’m this user so I have access to these resources. If I’m an iPad I go here and this is what I have access to. The reason we do that is because if we can solve that problem then we can push our mobility security solutions to that client. Now they know they can allow their security guards to bring their electronic devices to work, connect to the business network, and have access to those security assets on the network that they want pushed to them as events occur. I don’t think, for our client base, until we solve that BYOD issue on the network, mobility is very tough. Those IT guys will not let us in from the outside until that’s solved. We’ve seen a tremendous amount of increase in revenue on the IT side, because of the mobility push on not only the corporate but the fiscal security side as well. I am very excited about the mobility part of the industry right now.

Let’s talk competition. Is it getting tougher? Are there more players? How are you dealing with that, do you concern yourself about the competitor’s much or just kind of do what you need to do and know you’ll be successful? How do you gauge the competitive landscape right now?

Vezina: I think one problem for a lot of people is that with the recession it required a lot of businesses to go and get different types of businesses, because they’ve lost business. There were more competitors, especially on the government side. You’d get so many people bidding on the same project, there’s no money to be made there. I think the only way you can lighten up this new competition is to give your clients value by giving them good service that they just feel they can’t live without because they really like you. That’s how we do it. You hold on to your customers and then with that they’ll refer you to other customers. That’s how we grow.

Simmons: It’s a lot of competition but one of the trends we’re smiling about is the nationals. We hope they continue to buy each other. Every time there’s an acquisition we really smile because it means there will be a new opportunity for us. They haven’t figured out how to deliver customer service. That’s an opportunity because they just aren’t delivering good customer service. I think it’s all opportunities for us. Our greatest competition is the regional competitor because they’re usually the ones closest to the client delivering the customer service the client is looking for. That’s the best competition we run into, that they’re doing a good job. The nationals by and far are hurting themselves so much, we don’t fear them anymore. That’s a good thing. Let them keep buying.

Olivares: We don’t worry too much about the competition. But customers are learning their lesson really fast when they shop around, and they try to come back to us, because the quality of work that we do, the service we do. We’ll do a lot of people over from national players, customers are fed up with their services, their prices, and response and all that. It’s helped us with that part of the competition. In Arizona the territory is real flaky. A lot of companies are real flaky. They don’t do what they say they’re going to do. Arizona is still behind the times but we’re trying to change that. I think quality and talking. What we’re going to start doing is, the business development person we hired, he’s going to go talk to customers, the ones we don’t hear from, throughout the ones we do, pay them a visit, see how things are going, do some lunch-and-learns. That’s going to help us with some of the competition to be different from them.

Bumgardner: I agree with Larry that the nationals are kind of fun to compete with because they do have trouble delivering consistent customer service. The other aspect is they can’t adapt to technology at all. They struggle with that. I understand, they have such a large company usually that selling the technology for them is probably easy but actually deploying and supporting it would be very difficult with organizations that size. On the flipside of it, the smaller organizations that we do run into once in a while, are very competitive. The way we handle that is we turn it the other way and utilize professional services to outsell them. Typically they’re lacking as-is board-certified security professionals to help develop security plans. They’re lacking EEs, CAD operators, things of that nature. So on the more competitive side we straight outsell them from a value standpoint because I think a lot of them are missing that, or they don’t have the capital to afford those types of resources internally. No matter what, the market is going to continue to get more competitive. It’s just a matter of what business model you’re going to form and how you’re going to take it to market, to help you win business.

Will: Competition it seems for us has gotten better instead of worse. It seems like that when we lose an account it’s generally something we did. We shot ourselves in the foot. It’s generally not a competitor in there that is out servicing us, unless we failed in a situation, which  unfortunately we do from time to time. As we’ve moved away as the commoditization as the low end of the market has happened, and we’ve moved more into the mid part of the market, we think the competition there is not quite as bad. We’ve also tried to narrow or focus on fewer product lines, which has helped narrow the playing field a bit. In our opinion the competition situation has gotten better instead of worse.

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Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at [email protected].

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