Professional Services Offering Examined

The launch of a formal professional services department by Genetec [link no longer available] raises 2 interesting questions/points.

Genetec notes that this adds, "three new initiatives including field service and project engineering, deployment project management and custom solutions development."

In a follow-up email to their press contacts, they needed to clarify that "Our go-to-market strategy has not changed and we will continue to drive business through sales channel partners." According to the email, people had expressed concerns about this.

Our question is why this is needed and what this implies about the complexity of Genetec's products? While almost all VMS companies offer assistance for large projects, usually integrators can handle all but the largest deployments by themselves.

Certainly, Genetec has far more large and complex deployments than most providers. However, as a recent discussion about Genetec on our LinkedIn Group [link no longer available] and our experience testing Omnicast indicates, Genetec is complex and can be hard to administer.

Professional Services can be helpful but they can also become an expensive fix for products that are difficult to deploy.