I’ve posted before on the various channel partners that I believe are good fits for our service and for MVaaS in general.  There are a lot of potential partners that are interested in adding a recurring, managed service to their portfolio, particularly one that is differentiated and has a very measurable and powerful ROI.

Two segments in particular are (or should be) very natural channels: security integrators and broadband service providers.  When we first launched our channel efforts about a year ago, we decided to focus the bulk of our efforts on establishing partnerships with those two segments to see which one takes off faster.  We’ve gotten very good early traction with partners in both spaces and have been supporting a number of partners and pursuing a number of large opportunities with both.

Given its been a year, I thought I’d give a quick readout on how the two channels are developing.  The short answer is that broadband service providers (BSPs) are ahead by a mile.  This is great for broadband service providers, but should serve as a bit of a wake up call for the security integrators that they are going to face competition from a new segment that is much more aggressively adopting technology that will leapfrog a lot of what is in the market today.

Before I get into why BSPs are ahead, let me put some numbers on it to give you some context (per a motto from my Bain days, “in God we trust, everyone else bring data”).  Envysion works with partners to jointly sell to large multi-unit businesses like retail and restaurants.  We are either in pilot or the early stage of rollout with a number of large customers with our partners.  Security integrators in total have us in front of customers that control in aggregate a couple thousand sites.  Almost all of these opportunities are ones in which we had some traction on our own and either ceded control to the security integrator who was also there or introduced the integrator in an effort to “prime the channel pump”.  In contrast, our BSP partners have introduced us into customer prospects that control in aggregate more than 15,000 locations, none of which we had a prior relationship.

The quality and pace of the activity coming out of the BSP channel is orders of magnitude better than it is out of the security integrator channel.  Clearly there is a chance this could be something we are causing ourselves by supporting one channel more effectively than the other, but in this case I think it is structural.

I’ll spend some time over the weekend putting my thoughts together in a concise way on this topic and will post the key points on why I think this is happening.