With the way the industry has shifted back and forth over the past couple years I am wondering who sells VMS (Milestone, Avigilon, Genetec, etc) and who focuses primarily on embedded NVRs (e.g. Hikvision, Dahua, etc)? What segment does the vast majority of your business fall into: consumer, SMB, or enterprise?
I am exempting HD Analog from this discussion currently as it blurs the lines significantly.
#1, good question. I'll add a poll.
First, do you consider Milestone Husky appliances to be VMS or NVR?
I debated making that distinction regarding that particular product... The same could be true of if someone purchases Avigilon's "HD-NVRs" which are just preloaded Windows servers from Dell. If the device is running some flavor of Windows or Windows server with even a moderately open VMS I would lump them in with VMS.
When I say NVRs I am thinking purpose-built, plug and play appliances that support only that given manufacturers product or third parties via the most basic ONVIF support (no dewarping, PTZ control, resolution changes, management of the camera, etc). If the device is running embedded Linux with no exposure to the OS it is definitely an NVR. For example I would lump most of the Hikvision/Dahua/Panasonic/Pelco product ranges into the embedded NVR category.
I agree with you on that distinction and added a poll at the top of the discussion. Thanks for the question!
Is everyone a manufacturer or should I have waited until Monday to post?
Is everyone a manufacturer or should I have waited until Monday to post?
There's 10 votes from integrators already and we have not promoted it yet since we had 4 posts to publish today.
Looks like I tied it up !
I would consider something like the Husky to be VMS. The reason we sell NVR's is I can get an NVR for a fraction of the price, then anything from Milestone, even their Husky line. We just partnered with Milestone so not knocking the product, and as we learn more about it, I see the value.
But our client base is not going to pay for those features.
I see the question more like do you sell a higher end VMS/hardware solution or a cheaper value based NVR.
Jay - is your client base primarily residential, SMB, or Enterprise? Also are they retail, financial, municipal/city/state government, federal government, or something else?
I ask because I wonder if the market segment and typical project scale dictates the product. For example, we focus on primarily large scale enterprise projects. While much of the company uses NVRs I use VMS and my numbers have shot through the roof recently, so much so that I get some fairly choice projects. However, I am frequently called upon to do SMB projects and special residences where the exact polar opposite is occurring as I dislike NVRs... a Razberi or a Husky is my bottom threshold of what I will use.
I was with another company and recently started my own. Long story
When I was at that other place, almost all of our business was multi-family/apartment communities. Security is a checkmark for them, the stories I could tell. They are not typically going to buy VMS with ongoing license fees, etc
Since I know that market, that is what I am also focusing on, but quickly trying to get into other markets.
Probably still not desirable in apartments but not all VMS have ongoing license fees. Avigilon is licensed and done, Milestone entry level product is either free or as close to free as possible, etc. Also, VMS tend to get updates, new driver packs, and so on which have development costs. I have a suspicion that most NVRs in the wild are still running their original, out of box firmware.
Until the beginning of last summer I personally sold a lot of NVR's (hundreds). We had great luck with them, never any failures. Now we hardly sell any NVRs and almost exclusively sell Spectrum even in very small systems. We found our technical support staff was getting bogged down with "how do I do this" questions from clients, while the NVR's were reliable they weren't easy to use for our clients. Spectrum has reduced the burden on our technical support group significantly. I figure it cost a little more to install Spectrum than a Hik NVR, but it costs us a lot less to support Spectrum, a lot of this has to do with being able to remote in using TeamViewer. Most of our business falls under the SMB category average system size since we started using Spectrum is 30 cameras or so. We also do a lot of residential, and we sell Spectrum there as well unless they're just wanting cloud storage then we use DMP.
I figure it cost a little more to install Spectrum than a Hik NVR, but it costs us a lot less to support Spectrum, a lot of this has to do with being able to remote in using TeamViewer.
Very good point. That is something that has been sorely missed on some of the embedded appliances (NVRs mostly) we install, particularly when it is in a different country.
Overall it is a far more even split than anticipated.
Thank you for participating everyone who voted.
#1, we plan to do a survey on this in the near future since survey results tend to get more responses (100+) and more detailed commentary. I am not sure when exactly we will run it but it is in queue.
We primarily sell NVRs/DVRs, though we also install Avigilon/Milestone for big enterprise systems. I prefer to work with VMS's myself, though for the residential and SMB installs that we mostly do Hikvision and Dahua DVRs/NVRs do a good enough job.
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