Basic Video Systems Still Show Market Strength
It’s not unusual for the press to latch onto a new trend or a breaking story and ride it hard to attract reader and advertiser attention, and to demonstrate its “inside” access to industry developments. Nothing wrong with that — we expect the fourth estate to deliver the news to us like this. Security Sales & Integration does an outstanding job of it.
However, we often hear military generals on TV ask: Why doesn’t the press talk about the “good” things and the progress being made in Iraq rather than constantly carp on negative issues that demoralize the troops. The reason is that which your mom and dad told you when you were growing up: Remember, there’s two sides to every story. I was reminded of this in one of the analyses we were developing for our new Worldwide Video Surveillance report.
The security press has been detailing the current trends in IP video, intelligent video, networks, servers, enterprise systems and the like, but there’s another side to the video surveillance story. Aside from the SSI’s balanced reporting, it’s one you don’t hear or read about much but is actually the basic underpinning of a supplier’s ability to gain, or at least hold, market share. It’s the day-to-day effort of sales forces to sell and install basic standalone video systems.
Access Control Leads Integration
When we did our research earlier this year, we asked integrators about their business, including just how much of their video sales volume was actually sold for the purpose of integration or networking with other security systems.
As the chart shows (see pg. 12 of the July print magazine), 46 percent of video surveillance systems sold in the past 12 months were destined for integration with access control systems. Monitored access systems are “naturals” for integration since tailgating and piggybacking have still not been eliminated — the reader stays in one spot, is easy to watch, and videoing authorized people as they come and go through doors is straightforward.
For a variety of reasons, video/intrusion systems are less popular, at only 31 percent of video sales. Intrusion is an old technology. To effectively activate enforcement, it needs to “see” and record real problem behaviors that may or may not be otherwise documented.
40% of Systems Are Standalone
There are other systems, including fire, biometrics and X-ray systems that are integrated, and they account for 23 percent of video system sales.
More than two of these systems are integrated together on occasion, and the net percentage of all video sales, subtracting out this duplication of more than one system being integrated with video, is almost 60 percent.
So sure, networking and integrated systems are important to growth in the video surveillance industry. But more than 40 percent of dollars are still being generated by basic standalone video systems. Suppliers face this challenge of allocating marketing resources to help integrators sell more of their products.
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