Add Hosted Access Control To Your Managed Services Portfolio

By Mike Monocello, Business Solutions magazine.

IT integrators looking for additional profit and a more sticky relationship with customers should consider adding hosted access control to their portfolios.

Why is hosted access control a good technology for IT integrators to sell?

John Szczygiel, COO, Brivo Systems: IT integrators already have the expertise to properly address the questions and concerns of IT departments regarding SaaS (software-as-a-service) services. This gives them a clear competitive advantage over less adept firms who may not be able to address INFOSec questions and consequently continue to propose outdated on-premise solutions. Additionally, selling hosted access enables the IT integrator to cement long-term relationships with their clients and drive additional revenue from recurring services.

John Smith, senior channel marketing manager, Honeywell Security: Access control makes good business sense for IT Integrators. Most are already selling to the same customers as security dealers, but IT integrators have an in-depth understanding of working with networks, accessing data through firewalls, and more. Some security dealers are very network savvy, but overall there is still a large learning curve for them vs. IT integrators.

Scott McNulty, senior product manager, Kantech, part of Tyco Security Products: Hosted, or managed access, is a great fit for IT integrators because end users already consider their IT integrators their solutions provider of choice for any networking issues within their business. Working with a customer’s internal IT infrastructure issues, like obtaining network and firewall access, is typically the biggest issue faced when deploying hosted or managed access control, so they are already handling these more complex issues on the IT side of the installation.