Given the strong industry trends supporting video surveillance providers and the fragmented nature of the market, it is no surprise the the NRA LP show was filled with a number of competitive video provider offerings. I’m not sure how other industries work, but I’ve found that our market has a refreshingly friendly competitive environment. I make it a point to get to know as many of the CEOs in our market as I can - and most are very open to the dialogue and happy to share their experiences and their high level direction.
NRA LP was no different. I caught up with a couple of folks that I’ve known for a while and it appears that business is going well for all (but of course I don’t really expect them to tell me otherwise - it may be friendly competition but none of us are stupid either!) There are a couple of reasons that I think we are all comfortable being relatively open with with each other, one is that the market is so big there is room for a lot of players to be successful, and two is that many of us have all taken very different approaches to the market and as a result really don’t play in the same places.
Take Intellivid. I reached out and met their CEO, Patrick Sobalvarro, at the show. He’s a fellow MIT alum and took a similar career path to me so we had a lot in common. We also both run video service providers that target retail operators among others. If you read our product and services material we espouse very similar value propositions - taking video beyond security to provide value to operations, loss prevention, marketing, etc - all resulting in improvements in profitability. If you were an analyst doing research on the market with just our websites as your data, you’d think we’d be direct competitors and be wary of talking to each other in any meaningful level of detail.
You’d also be way off. We almost never see each other in the same accounts, and its not just coincidence that we aren’t bumping into one another. We have different approaches to the problem and as result we tend to appeal to different types of customers. Our MVaaS solution appeals to operators that have many locations and want to provide access to video to a variety of people inside (and potentially outside) of the organization. Our target customers value ease of use, ease of management and the integration we can provide with other business systems. Intellivid provides very impressive video analytic capabilities that are designed to help identify shrink, track customers movements and quantify throughput and other metrics. They tend to be in large locations that do millions of dollars of business and that can justify significant investments in video related technology. We tend to be in smaller locations that are often capital constrained (hence the appeal of the subscription aspect of MVaaS) Patrick’s average revenue per customer site is probably 5-10X of ours, but I’m guessing the addressable market of number of sites is quite the opposite.
Patrick has been in the market a bit longer than I have and was gracious enough to share some of his experience with me and some suggestions on specific areas where our solution might resonate. Patrick - it was good to meet you and thanks for the insight. Best of luck as you continue to grow your business.
