A Security Integrator’s Guide to IT Functionality in Video Surveillance
Hyper-converged infrastructure is a critical opportunity for integrators to deliver a better solution than IT organizations, and at a lower cost.
Enterprise IT decision makers with data intensive environments - such as video surveillance - are demanding more infrastructure that is cost-effective, simple to manage and scales efficiently.
Key Strategies for Integrators
Ultimately, customer satisfaction is the overall key to success for security integrators. The following are strategies that can be used to ensure this success:
- Improve IT capabilities: Partner with solution providers who are experts in IT, and are willing to train and teach until you become a subject matter expert. This demonstrates that customers can rely on your expertise.
- Teach the benefits: Help customers understand that video surveillance data is different than ‘normal’ IT data, and the implications this brings to their server and storage infrastructure. Help users define the business, operational risk and impact of system downtime and data loss while teaching them the proper solutions and vocabulary to communicate this to stakeholders.
- Become IT savvy as quickly as possible: IT is increasingly involved in server and storage infrastructure buying decisions, preferring to make purchases from traditional and familiar partners and channels. This can lead to loss of hardware revenue for integrators.
- Provide great service at all times: Once the initial sale is confirmed, make a commitment to provide timely delivery and installation of systems. Afterwards, be sure to provide timely and effective support when issues arise.
Quality of service is what is most often communicated from end users about why they like or dislike an integrator. Great service leads to customer loyalty and repeat business – critical in today’s market in which end users are rarely ‘finished’ buying and implementing security technology.
Solutions built to mirror and incorporate benefits delivered to the IT community, such as HCI, empowers end users to scale while positioning themselves as future-ready. By embracing a solution that provides end-to-end flexibility, operational agility of rapidly deploying resources is achieved along with simplification of storage allocation and computing.
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Bio: Brandon Reich is senior director of surveillance solutions for Pivot3.
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