SAN ANTONIO – When you hear the word “business,” many terms and ideas come to mind. Profit, deadlines, sales, marketing, and competition may be a few.
Milestone Systems has been evolving the terms “company” and “business” into a broader idea of “community.” One that comes together to collaborate on new solutions. The sum is greater than the individual parts.
Attending MIPS 2017, I was able to see what professional collaboration can create when a superb platform is utilized to facilitate creative thinking, exchanging ideas and building working relationships.
Milestone delivered their uniqueness through their unconventional opening ceremony.
Redefining reality seems like a theme with Milestone. Using Jiva’s Virtual Reality (VR) headset, every attendee had the opportunity to visit Milestone’s headquarters across the pond, with a little narration from Lars Thinggaard, Milestone’s President & CEO.
This is a clear demonstration that the organization as a whole is not afraid to use unorthodox approaches to keep their purpose and mission stable.
As mentioned early on, this is not the time for business as usual.
If you are going to be competitive in the 21st century with a new generation of customers that demand streamlined and innovative services, combining culture, collaboration, and purpose is absolutely essential.
They asked an interesting question: “What Will You See?” What a great question to pose for someone starting their security career as a salesperson.
It will remind me to bring a different perspective to my prospects and customers when delivering security solutions. I will take that advice to heart as a major take away from this show.
Milestone demonstrates a vision to see how the success in smartphones as a platform transformed a stable flip phone market into something else. That business model will serve the IP video market in similar ways.
Specialized apps and their hardware elements will provide cost effectiveness and innovation in solving security problems we know of and ones we are not yet aware exist.
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Not only were they able to create the most dynamic VMS available, they built bridges that attracted companies/products to engineer their own VMS add-ons to diversify their services. Milestone saw the limits of proprietary software and its barrier towards true collaboration.
This was my first year attending MIPS and I came with an open mind, which Milestone filled.
The Innovation Lab showed us that with a platform mentality, you can attract energetic entrepreneurs and security professionals to bring their innovations to market efficiently, very much like a phone app. Can you imagine a smart phone without an app store?
I was really impressed with the Milestone staff and their commitment to making MIPS a truly collaborative event. MIPS is a special way to remind their customers and partners why they chose Milestone over their competition.
Seeing organizations develop business models based on a collaborative purpose will surely attract the brightest talent available and inspire a whole new generation of young professionals.
Brian Boucherle is a communication analyst intern at Matterhorn Consulting and can be contacted at [email protected]. His father and Matterhorn principal, Paul Boucherle, pens Security Sales & Integration’s Business Fitness column.
