Race To The Bottom, Loss In Profitable Revenue

Josh, good question. Btw, I put this in queue for a future integrator survey so we can get 100 responses structured for this. For now, though, I am curious to hear what people have to say.

Interesting business model - Urban Alarm 

Pro-active service is growing a lot for us.   We can monitor most of our systems and deal with issues before they become a problem to maximum system uptime. 

It's true about being pro-active. I couldn't find a tool specific for the security industry so I created the Neptus system found here. Https://www.mylussystems.com/neptus

It's design to manage IP assets and provide early warnings such as RAID disk failures, temperature alarms and save intermittent camera snapshots so upgrades and out-of-focus issues can be activley addressed.

Michael, Damien - are you guys selling this as an add-on service to your customers? Thus capturing more revenue, or is this more of a selling point to show value over competing, low cost/low margin competition? 

For us it is an add-on which I used to offer as an option.   Now it is included on every quote that goes out the door. 

It can be either actually. The goal is improving system reliability, giving controlled access to techs of the info they need 24/7 and providing big data type analysis of what hardware/firmware is most/least reliable. Ever need to go back to site as the tech could find a password at 2am? Neptus records all data (and images) for any customisable duration so trends over time can be analysed. Ever need to demonstrate to an IT department that pings have been intermittently dropping from a batch of devices since their network upgrade?

Even for clients under fully comp agreements, replacing the first disk in RAID is far quicker (and no downtime) then getting that call from the client saying they cant playback video.

Sure charge clients too but the extra service calls and upgrades would easily outweight any expense.

I don't currently compete (at least not well) in the marketspace where Hik/Dahua cameras are the order of the day.  I have to assume that the only ways to make up revenue lost is to either diversify your products (e.g. card access), add services as others have said, or sell more cameras.  Eventually the final option will run out.

In a way, it is like the big box retailers - want more revenue?  Open up more stores.  Eventually, the market has to hit saturation.