Avigilon's Sales Expansion and Policies Examined

In this note, we examine the sales expansion and policies of Avigilon, an HD surveillance manufacturer, which has grown at a very high rate over the last few years using an atypical, if not contrarian, sales approach. 

In the past 12 months, Avigilon has roughly doubled the number of their sales managers, adding 10 new members in the last few months (3 announced in December [link no longer available] and 7 announced in February [link no longer available]). This comes on the heels of a reported 300% year over year growth rate since 2007 and approximate revenue of $40 Million CAD in 2010.

While the IP surveillance market is growing robustly (somewhere in the area of 40% growth), Avigilon's rate is notably strong.

Avigilon reports that the goal of the new hires is to increase density of coverage in existing territories within North America and Europe.

One of the most interesting aspects of Avigilon is their strong focus on integrator driven sales. While channel sales are obviously common in the industry, a few practices of Avigilon are not:

• Avigilon does not use traditional big name distributors - the product is not available through ADI, Northern, Anixter, Scansource, etc.
• Avigilon is especially vigilant about enforcing and removing online product availability. It is quite hard to find their products for sale online and when one does, it is usually pulled within days.

These steps have helped make them a 'fan favorite' of many integrators who want to have greater exclusivity / restrictions on outsiders buying products. On the other hand, this can prevent others, such as end users who want to self-install, from using Avigilon.

Certainly, Avigilon financial results speak for themselves. We do believe it will be interesting to see how their model scales as they move closer to $100 Million in revenue. While there is some precedent for larger manufacturers tightly controlling their channel (Verint and NICE come to mind), most of the larger providers in the market have broad product availability (e.g., American Dynamics, Axis, Panasonic, Pelco, Sony, even Milestone on the software only side).