Editorial: Your Future is Staring you in the Face

Aug. 9, 2013
SD&I magazine is here to help you succeed

Your future, and that of your company and its employees, is staring you right in the face. You use it every day for many different tasks, including finances, shopping, video and much more. It’s hosted and cloud services and it’s the opportunity of a lifetime for alarm dealers and installers and systems integrators.

Sure, there’s a learning curve, but hosted video and other managed services allow you to be the hosting agent or farm out that part of the business to a third-party provider who might specialize in that aspect of the business. In fact, there are so many different varieties and flavors of hosted and cloud-based services that there’s surely a fit for any company—large or small. In fact, the smaller companies may reap the most benefit if they can leverage this technology fully—they can look like a big proud papa of all these different managed access control and video—without having the headache of it by offering it through third party provider. Third party providers may include large hosting services, or also can include some and many of the central monitoring stations in our own industry—and they have the marketing tools and other business intelligence you need to sell this successfully. Leave it to these experts, and you’ll be sitting pretty now and in the future.

Inside this issue

Many companies have made the successful move to hosted services — and many more continue to take the plunge every day. Read about these firms and hosting companies in our special focus, starting on page 20, where we give you “10 Steps to Hosted Profits,” in our roundtable compilation. Here we have tips from your peers on how to get started; the sales model; and other critical criteria so you plunge right in and make it part of your plan. Speaking of plunging in, that’s just what Advance Technology did when it began offering hosted and managed video. The traditional alarm company turned progressive systems integrator is based in Maine and has been going strong into this area and has increased its profitability with newfound burgeoning RMR. You can read all about it in the Integrator Insights profile on page 60.

There’s so much more in this issue to help you do business better. There’s a great story on power management and monitoring and you wouldn’t believe how that product category has changed over the years, see page 48 to read all about it. PSA Security Network’s new director of training and education Barbara Shaw has a great story on time management, with nuts and bolts you can put to work for you and your company today, page 56. And did you know that not all PoE is created equal? Yes, it’s true and see page 52 for all the information you need to know in this technology category.

I didn’t want this column to focus on what’s going on with me, but I wanted to let all my fantastic readers know that this is my last issue as editor of SD&I magazine. I’ve taken on a public relations role with a fantastic woman-owned company in the security industry and am looking forward to new endeavors. I’ll miss the close contact I’ve had with the integrator community but I feel you are all really poised to succeed. All you have to do is get started---and I hope SD&I magazine has shown you how. So it’s not farewell, but see you soon—at one of the next security shows. Keep learning, keep growing and keep making yourselves successful—and I know you will! Best of luck to all of you. 

Editor's note: Paul Rothman is the new editor of SD&I. You can reach him at [email protected].