Giant Tyco Campaigns Against Startup Qumulex

One is a giant conglomerate that owns the world's largest security integrator.

The other has no shipping products.

But Tyco is campaigning against Qumulex.

Inside this note, we examine the match-up and why Tyco would care about a startup.

History / Exacq

Tyco acquired Exacq in 2013. Now, the Exacq team is back, starting Qumulex.

The problem for Tyco / JCI is that Qumulex has skills and relationships that directly compete with Tyco / JCI. And, while JCI has taken steps more recently to recover, overall they have damaged Exacq during the 6 years they have owned the company (see Exacq declining Favorability Results 2019).

Campaign

Tyco Cloud Solutions is running an online campaign against Qumulex and others [update - they deleted the specific manufacturer promotion after we posted this]:

The obvious reason is that Tyco is shipping product and Qumulex is not. It really should not be hard to sell against something that is not available, even for Tyco.

Problem - Qumulex Coming

The problem for Tyco is that they realize that Qumuelex is coming. Qumulex says their first release will be this fall where they aim to provide a unified video / access offering.

Because many dealers did so well with Exacq, because Tyco / JCI owns a competitor integrator, and because of the challenges at Exacq, there is certainly going to be many dealers tempted to defect to Qumulex.

Tyco / Qumulex Matchup

Again, it is hard to compare something that exists to something that does not, yet. However, Tyco has strengths here. They acquired VSaaS provider SmartVue in 2018 and have released a number of Exacq cloud features including cloud drive storage (tested) and remote cloud access (tested). So it is not as if Qumulex will be facing a 'cloud-less' Tyco.

Moreover, how fast Qumulex develops remains to be seen. Building a new VMS from scratch is very resource-intensive. Of course, they have advantages since they have expertise in having done it multiple times before. However, even with that, we think they would need at least through 2020, if not 2021 to flush out the product.

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