Letter To PRO Members 2012

We had an excellent 2011 and are planning for an even bigger 2012. This letter to our PRO members details how we plan to improve our service in 2012 as well as our current financial and strategic positioning.

2011 Key Developments

The two biggest improvements we made in 2011 were:

• Shootouts - With over 20 shootouts already, these reports are redefining how to select surveillance cameras. For the first time, professionals around the world can see cameras tested side by side in real world applications to truly understand what is actually 'better'.
• Surveys - Our fall survey series provided insights into what integrators really prefer and use, providing hard data and broad perspectives of what people are actually deploying and why they do so.

Readership to IPVM increased over 30% this year. We attribute this growth primarily to the success of the shootout and survey series.

2012 Plans

We are keeping the core of what we did in 2011 and are going to expand in 3 key ways:

• Application Guides - Like our popular Casino Guide, we will publish guides for various surveillance applications such as education, government, military, utilities, etc. The guides will combine our test results and input from integrations to provide clear guidance of best options and key tradeoffs for each application.
• Expanded Surveys - We see many more opportunities ahead to gather insights from the community and share them with our members. Currently, we are preparing our Winter 2012 survey series [link no longer available]. After that, we will ramp up a survey covering end users that will provide great insights as well. We see survey results as a strong compliment to our testing so that members can compare and contrast what we find works the best to what and why is being used in the field.
• Access and Intrusion - We will definitely expand our coverage to the rest of the physical security market in 2012. Early in 2011, we launched IP Security Market. However, that was then put on hold as we concentrated on video.  However, there remains a clear need for improved acess and intrusion information. In 2012, we will fill it.
• Expanding the IPVM Team - In 2012, we will hire 3 new senior researchers to increase the breadth of our overall coverage and to ramp up access and intrusion coverage. We're Hiring! [See more below]

2011 Financial and Strategic Positioning 

Revenue and profits grew robustly in 2011. Revenue was up 60% year over year and profitability surged. Since we started the PRO member service at the end of 2008, we have always broken even (or better). However, now we have become robustly profitable.

We have a strong financial position which is critical for growth and independence. There are no outside investors and we have no debt. Plus, we now have growing cash reserves and a proven business model. Combine that with a highly diverse customer base (no customer accounts for even 0.2% of our revenue) and subscription model gives us an excellent foundation for growth.

We are building a team of world class security experts from around the globe. I am looking for people passionate about security and who have deep technical expertise with security products [no trade mag editors nor market analysts need apply]. Location does not matter. Indeed, in 2012, I would like to hire at least one expert from outside the US as part of the 3 new team members. [If you are interested or know of someone who is interested, please let me know].

2012 Growth

As we expand our team, it will allow us to cover different areas, provide more perspectives and deepen our interaction with PRO members.

With our increased financial strength, we will actually improve more in 2012 than we did in 2011. Please let us know if you have feedback, questions or recommendations on improvements you would like to see.