Milestone: "Easy Money Days Are Over"
By: Brian Karas, Published on Feb 17, 2017
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Comments (15)
John Honovich
Sure, the easy money days are over if you use Milestone.
But many Hikvision dealers love it every time Hikvision does another price cut. I see their logic. Hikvision wants to lose money to win market share? Ok, their dealers will make money in the process.
Agree/disagree?
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Undisclosed Integrator #1
I see this, on last 30 years SW industries.
What happend with nother large SW battle? PC OS's, PC's desktop app SW, etc.
What I see on large VMS's systems
15y ago: a lot SW vendors offering, same with very good technolgy diferentiation feacture, other close solutions. USD5K/channel (fixed dome SD+SW)
10y ago: multibrand VMS, and first steps into HW standarizations, Onvif. USD3K/channel (fixed dome HD+SW)
5y ago: full Onvif features, better compressions and managent option, more stable plattaform. but USD 2K/channel (3MP+SW)
Now: China offering, (mine not only HW offering) VMS battle & pricing drop.. USD 1K/channel) 5MP+SW
If this's not a dead of glory days, can anyone tell me what is?
That's becouse from 2010 my focus is services.
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Undisclosed Integrator #2
There is going to be a lot of competition at the bottom if people are racing to the bottom. This is going to make it hard to win on price in the long term. This turns your offerings into commodities.
I would strongly agree with the assertion above that the deep technical skills are needed to address the complexity involved in streaming so many HD video feeds over a computer network.
It would seem that companies have a choice to lower their prices to increase their competitive advantage or start to innovate and develop the deep technical skills to target the complex enterprise market. There is no single universal answer to this question as every market/vertical has different needs.
This really seems to be the exact market disruption that happened during the migration from analog to digital IP cameras. End users had the choice between price and larger capabilities. Sometimes the additional capabilities allowed the IP cameras to have a lower price due to various benefits. One such benefit was when using existing wiring and switching on a larger multi building computer networks. A lot of customers, however, did not need the high resolution or better capabilities of IP cameras.
It should be hard to compete and stay competitive on either track, so the easy money days are over.
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Undisclosed Integrator #3
Camera margins are eroding, but things like wireless IP locks are expanding and growing the top and bottom line of access control jobs. Not to mention cheaper cameras allows a larger deployment to sell digital guard tours etc into.
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Simon Barnes
"Asserting that integrators can sell a "platform" strategy assumes that those integrators have a deep understanding of Milestone partner products, and how to successfully integrate those into a full solution. While some might say this is the core function of integrators, many integrators are wisely hesitant to bring untested software/solutions into live customer deployments without having fully proven the solution."
This is where Milestone fails in my opinion. They should show integrators how to install devices from different manufacturers and get them working together with short videos on how to configure if they want us to sell more licences.
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Undisclosed #4
Is that supposed to be some kind of reassurance?
I'll take the money, he can have all the glory.
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Undisclosed Integrator #5
The next cycle is coming...
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John Honovich
Update: Milestone said our description of their approach was inaccurate, clarifying:
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Undisclosed Manufacturer #7
It's easy to drop your prices if you have the backing of for example a government behind you investing billions of Dollars which must 'help' or at least subsidize and enable low prices. Low labor cost in the far east is of course of great benefit as well if you are looking to keep costs down in hardware manufacturing and even software design. I do believe however there is a market for the likes of Milestone, Genetec, Axis and Avigilon alongside the Chinese brands. Nobody will gain world domination anytime soon and there should still be glory days left for those who manage to innovate and bring new offerings to the market, as long as they listen to the end users...
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