Avigilon EVP Engineering Quits

One of the big criticisms last year was multiple executives leaving Avigilon.

Now, Avigilon's EVP of Engineering quits out of nowhere.

In this note, we look at how this impacts Avigilon, their engineering organization and their overall management.

Danny Kam was with Avigilon ~2.5 years, first as VP of Engineering, and promoted to EVP of Engineering last year.

Today, Kam quit to 'pursue personal endeavors' with no replacement named or transition. Avigilon's CTO Mahesh Saptharishi [link no longer available] remains and will lead all of engineering (Saptharishi was previously President and CTO of VideoIQ who Avigilon acquired).

This leaves Avigilon's engineering leadership thin. While Avigilon has 10 total [link no longer available] executives [link no longer available], now only 1 is from engineering / technology. Avigilon had a respected access control engineering leader but he unfortunately passed away last year.

Avigilon's engineering organization is getting bigger as they now develop cameras, recorders, video analytics, access control, etc. Based on their most recent financials, Avigilon is on pace to spend $30 million annually on R&D. While they do not break out employees by division, given that spend we would expect 100+ engineers out of Avigilon's 775 employees.

Relative to most competitors, Avigilon has been releasing products at a moderately faster rate, with new multi-imager cameras, demoing of a 7K camera and integrating analytics into the Pro series this spring.

The bigger challenges for Avigilon likely lie elsewhere, most specifically the decelerating growth rate, increased low-cost competition and the natural challenge of scaling at higher revenue / dealer saturation levels.

On the plus side, Avigilon can point to this being the first major executive departure in a year. With the increased stock turmoil and declining growth, though, they will need to minimize further departures and the ongoing protests of Avigilon lower level employees especially in Vancouver.