ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: The Roundtable Discussion Continues …
Trapanese: I’m speaking off the top of my head with no real thought on this. As an integrator, I’m not sure I really care. I think the manufacturer should care. It would behoove the manufacturers to figure out their standards, and the guys who actually do it best and fastest will win. So it’s a huge value to the manufacturer, and it would be a huge value to the customer. To me as an integrator from a perfectly selfish perspective, the more complicated and difficult it is the more value I add. The more my business grows the more people I hire to manage this whole thing. I don’t really think about standards. The first thing we do with our customers is we sit down and make sure we establish a standard for them to apply uniformly across the world. Once that is done, we’re going to apply their standards across the world from an industry perspective. I think there’s huge value there for the manufacturer and the customer, but as an integrator from the selfish perspective, that’s good stuff for me.
Yunag: You’ve made a great point. People have told me and I have told people that there’s margin in complexity; there’s comfort in that for us. The longer it takes, I think the better off we all are. However, my personal opinion is that this is an inevitability; it’s just a matter of when. I enjoy hearing other people’s opinions about that because I feel like it’s overdue and it will happen, but is it three years or 10 years? I’ve always kind of made the comment to people that eventually someone will become the Microsoft Windows of the security world that we’ll write drivers and software for. Often there will be a platform that becomes somewhat of a universally accepted piece and type of a front end for all of the hardware that’s out
there. It can be done. If that desire was there in the 1990s to have that shake-out and still standards emerged for IT, then it’s possible for this industry. It’s just a matter of time.
Trapanese: I believe it is going to happen. It will behoove manufacturers to get there. There is a manufacturer that’s coming from the network side of life that, from a product perspective, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do. But I’m sure they’re scaring the heck out of people on the fact that they’re going to have to come up with a standard because this networking company, you know, they make IP phones now. You can use whatever phone you want, plug it into the network. They’ve won that battle, so I imagine people will hopefully get on it. It will add huge value to the customer and huge value to the manufacturer, but as integrators we’ll find something else that’s complex to deal with, which is fine.
Levine: I like what you’re saying, which is kind of in a different way of what I said before. I don’t really care about the standards. We’re still going to do what we’re doing. We’re not going to wait. I love the way Eric puts it: margin and complexity. I agree with that completely. On the other hand, if it takes five or 10 years, that’s a blink of the eye. It’s not very long. Ten years is just not a very long time. It’s going to happen fairly quickly.
Does this sort of stick-in-the-mud approach taken by the security industry, as compared to IT, negatively affect your interaction with IT network guys as your customers? Does it turn them off to the security proposition because they don’t think it’s sophisticated enough, or it does not mesh with the way they do everything else?
Ladd: The IT guy is my friend; he’s not my enemy. That whole convergence thing with, ‘Oh the IT guys are going to mess things up; they won’t let you put things on their network.’ I never really found that to be true. I think, also, that many members of our industry are forward-thinking. They adapted very well to that. We go to meetings now and we welcome the IT department. We want them there because then the job is much easier for everybody if it works right the first time. I never really embraced that the IT is against the physical. They mesh very well together. We’re in a computer age. It’s part of our lives. And I really do think that a lot of the integrators are forward-thinking. They are always keeping up on technology and they are always moving in a forward direction, and adapting.
Levine: I agree completely. If we don’t have a desktop services or a network services person involved, one of each at least, we’re surprised. We always encourage it; we always work well with it. We have to. I don’t think that’s mysterious, and I don’t think there’s that big challenge to it. I think there are times when the IT departments that are maybe most in charge of managing the applications may be nervous about managing an application that they’re not trained on. That’s why they rely on us, which is again complexity and margin. I don’t think that’s bad, and I think that they all accept that as well. They outsource support for different applications today. We’re fitting into their model today, and I think that’s comfortable for everybody. I don’t find it uncomfortable.
Trapanese: From an IT perspective, the whole word ‘convergence,’ you don’t even want to bring it up to them. That was five or 10 years ago, and we’re way beyond that point. So IT is our friend. We have IT departments provide servers, enable cameras with PoE, etc. All we do is show up, plug in the camera and turn it on. And so, we work really well with IT, and they like working with us. We might, on occasion, joke around about the level of technology on some of the stuff.
Levine: They’re not having to provide as many static IPs as they used to, and that’s comfortable.
Trapanese: I’m wondering about the forward-thinking part of it. I agree with you, but I wonder if there is a self-selection press going on here. Not that I would say any different, but just being at ISC and talking to the manufacturers, their biggest complaint was that they can’t deal with the integrators anymore and that they would have to do it themselves because the integrators aren’t sophisticated, and they are not forward-thinking. That’s not anything that I specifically have any knowledge to but it’s just what I heard at ISC. It’s amazing, the reoccurring theme.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine
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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