Articles
How To Break Into Security
August 3, 2009
Paul Constantine, vice president of merchandising for ScanSource Security, talks about entering the physical security market in an exclusive interview with Business Solutions magazine President Jim Roddy.Download Podcast (right click on link to download)
Length: 9 min, 15 sec
BSM: The main question is how to break into security. Why don’t you start there. For a reseller, how would they do that?
Constantine: The physical security marketplace is growing very fast. And also while it’s growing, it’s going through a change. It’s moving from proprietary, analog-based systems to IP systems where the camera or the access control device is merely a node on a network connected through an Ethernet cable back to a server and is managed through traditional network tools.
Really this plays into the hands of integrators that have networking expertise and relationships with IT directors or IT-level people at the end user. We get a lot of calls from these types of integrators. They come from the point of sale marketplace, the telecom marketplace, the AIDC marketplace, or they’re just general system integrators that have solved networking solutions for many years and they see opportunities in physical security.
There’s really two ways that we help coach these customers through being able to capitalize on the opportunity. The first path that we can help guide these people down is through partnerships. We spend a lot of time facilitating partnerships amongst the traditional security dealers that we have thousands of in our customer base that we’ve been supporting for many years. They have the expertise in physical security. They understand things like camera placement, lens selection, focal distance and all those nuances of physical security that aren’t readily obvious to a newcomer to the marketplace.
The other path that we can take if the reseller/integrator so desires, we can coach them through the acquisition of the expertise needed to take advantage of the opportunity.
It’s up to the reseller as to how they want to pursue the opportunity. Do they want to build the expertise internally or do they want to subcontract it out to an existing security dealer?
This is only a portion of this exclusive interview. For the complete podcast, go to the media player at the top of this page.
