Integrators, Is Convergint Taking Business From You?

We have seen them in our market here in the Midwest but they don't have an office here yet. Mainly government work in our area they are picking up.

Very limited activity.  I have heard of them more often outside our territory than within.  In fact, we have recently taken a sizable account from them.  I have not heard of the opposite occurring.  We know they are out there but see them as less of a threat than electrical contractors who have low voltage divisions.

In Florida they've won a couple jobs over us, and we've taken some accounts from them. We're a small 25 person total company. I get the sense from some of the accounts we've taken over from larger companies in general is while they may have supposedly the resources to deal with larger clients, it takes them longer to get some things done (not sure why, maybe internal red tape), they don't quite have that individual level of service (I guess when you're a $750 million a year company, you don't feel customer who make $10 million a year deserve as much of your attention), and we tackle a some things I guess they don't really want to get into, even though you'd think with their size they'd have enough staff in the org to do it. By this I mean for example, integrating things like package barcode scanning into video, mass notification systems that are more IT related than security related, managing projects that involve other things like gates and fire systems as a kind of GC so the customer doesn't have to do it all. I guess I'm trying to say when companies get a certain size they become more rigid in the way they do things.

Btw, we just ran a survey with 100+ integrator responses about Convergint and other national integrators. Expect individual posts on each of these companies (Convergint, ADT, Tyco, Siemens, etc.) over the next month.

We had a booth right across the aisle from them a few weeks ago at a local trade-show. Some attendees stopped at their booth, made a bee line for them actually. But it was obvious they had an existing relationship. And some stopped at ours. Oddly enough, not many stopped at both. I think they are working on more enterprise level projects and we are working on smaller projects.

So no they are not taking business from us.

I would imagine most small to mid size integrators don't have the resources or personel required to play in the leagues Convergint does. Convergint is working with large fortune 100, large new construction projects with big GC's/multiple trades and many moving parts, and large integrated enterprise systems.