Comnet may be a young company, but it has been aggressively carving out market share of the video connectivity space, and that continued at ISC West with a few new product offerings. However, the key to the company's success, according to vice president of marketing Skip Haight, can be found back in the company's Connecticut home.
"Being made in the U.S.A. is our biggest differentiator," Haight said from the show floor on Thursday. "If you can take proce out of the equation (by offering a product at the same price as a competitior) and give someone a choice, the will take the U.S.-made product 10 out of 10 times."
The numbers bear out Haight's claim. Comnet doubled in size and value from 2010 to 2011. "Our products are newly engineered, and our rep channel is very aggressive" Haight said.
And the video transmission products continue to grow out of the company's 26,000-square-foot U.S. manufacturing facility, on what seems like a show-by-show basis. This time, the headliner is the company's first fiber optic video product designed to transport HDMI high-resolution video over optical fiber.
Other new products include a fiber optic distance extending interface that allows optical connectivity between one card reader and its associated door or gate locking hardware, and any Wiegand, Magstripe, or F/2F-based control panel; and a pair of self-managed Ethernet switches, one a five-port model and the other a four-port. They allowthe Ethernet data to be combined and inserted on to the network. The self-management feature requires no user intervention and is pre-programmed, meaning user knowledge isn't required for the managed switches.
