SNG Panels Reveal Rapid and Transformative Changes for Integrators

“We truly are seeing the request, the demand, to be more than just an integrator or an installer,” he said. “Today, we can no longer just be cable pullers and connect screw terminals to make something work. Our customers are confused and are coming to us asking for help. There are not enough people within enterprise businesses to go out and really research all the technology stacks they need to solve an outcome. So they’re asking us.”

Scott Elkins, CEO of Zeus Fire and Security, emphasized the integrator’s expanding role in the value chain: “Ken was right on point. The end-user is now looking for us to be more than just an installer, but really a service provider to bring that entire solution, the entire value chain, all the way through.”

These expanding customer expectations have accelerated dramatically, creating new pressures on integrators. John Palumbo, President of Unlimited Technology, outlined several key changes: “We’re seeing a sense of urgency, which is one of the main pieces. I was just on the phone earlier, where a client was escalating something because somebody wasn’t responding to an e-mail that they sent 10 minutes ago. Speed in communication is the key.”

Despite technological transformation and related customer demands, the human element remains central. “I will tell you what has not changed – and we are passionate about this – is that security is still a people business,” Poole said. “Relationships are everything.”

The RMR Evolution Continues

The shift toward Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and recurring revenue models emerged as another central theme during the “State of the Integrator” panel, though customer adoption rates varied among the integrators.

John Nemerofsky, COO of SAGE Integration, stressed the importance of building internal capabilities: “It’s important to build a program or a playbook of how you’re going to deliver that SaaS model – whether it is through weapons detection or gunshot detection, or it’s managed access or managed video, visitor management, lobby management, lobbying system, hoteling systems.”

Poole noted: “We’re seeing [demand], but maybe not as fast as anticipated. There are still a lot of customers who are hesitant to move into a SaaS model, so we’re working in a hybrid space right now.”

Elkins emphasized the value proposition behind recurring revenue: “We don’t talk about [SaaS] from a selfish standpoint,” he said. “We talk about it in ways to help customers and end-users simply do a better job of protecting people, properties, and profits.”

Cybersecurity as Table Stakes

The convergence of physical and cybersecurity has made cyber awareness essential for integrators. Nemerofsky described the evolution: “To deploy cloud for any client, you get asked about SOC 2 compliance. I remember about five years ago when I got asked that question, and I had to say, ‘Let me go check with my IT director, and I’ll get back to you.’ Now, it’s table stakes as an integrator working with any clients.”

Poole acknowledged the challenge while emphasizing partnerships: “I will never sit here and tell you that I will ever be a cybersecurity expert,” he admitted. “So, I need to have a right hand who is, and that’s why partnerships are super important, so we can stay ahead of it.”

Manufacturer-Integrator Collaboration

The panel concluded with a discussion on how manufacturers can better support integrators. “Going back to the earlier comment about relationships, tying those end-user/integrator relationships to the manufacturer can bring everyone together,” Palumbo said.

Added Elkins: “As technology evolves and changes, there’s a three-legged stool concept which is more important than ever. There’s the integrator, the customer, and the manufacturer – and to think that any one of those can solve problems on their own is a bit naive. Solving them together makes a lot more sense.”

“There are a lot of solutions available for investigations, but the preventative side has always been really high on the wish list for a lot of customers,” he said. “Until now, the technology hasn’t really been there. AI has been around for a long time, and we’ve been using computer vision for a long time, but advancements in agentic AI are really unlocking the ability for the industry to focus on prevention.”

Don Young, CEO of Everon, offered a more pragmatic view of current AI deployment: “From my experience, there’s a little bit more of a meat and potatoes ROI factor to using AI. All the things that Steve [Lindsay] said are spot on – they’re just a little bit scary for at least some of our customers. We’re trying to understand how AI becomes a practical value to the customer and a value in both directions. For us, we’re focused right now on the things that basically remove costs – things that have short-term confident ROI, like commoditized actions that humans are performing.”

Meanwhile, to kick off the anticipated “Security Megatrends” panel, Brivo CEO Steve Van Till revealed the extent of AI adoption: “SIA reported that 55% of the companies that exhibited at ISC West in 2025 claimed to use AI in their products.”

Van Till went on to describe how much of the tech world sees AI as a mass extinction event for traditional, hand-coded software. “Now, AI is capable of doing a great deal of that work,” he said. “The entire Microsoft Office suite – Word, Excel, and PowerPoint – has all been reproduced on top of AI platforms in very little time. Somebody reproduced all the capabilities of Slack in about 30 hours of compute on Anthropic’s Claude platform. My takeaway [for software vendors] is, if it can kill Slack, it can kill you.”

He did couch that with some reassurance: “Fortunately, the security industry has some moats that other industries don’t have. We’ve got a hardware anchor – you are not going to replace hardware with 30,000 hours of runtime on Claude,” Van Till explained. “We have integrators providing expert advice and putting everything into the facilities – you are not going to replace all of those integrators with 30,000 hours on a generative AI platform. And finally, we live in a world where interconnectedness across multiple products from multiple vendors is still very much of an art form that cannot be replicated with any amount of web searching or product probing.”

That said, the AI evolution had led to what Van Till touted as the invisible megatrend. “In this case, it is the growing share of the security product wallet that is taken by software vs. hardware,” he said. “There are several implications for the industry. One, because the majority is soon going to be software, the margins and the cash flow will be in software, not in hardware. Most of the new companies in our industry are software companies (or majority software companies), not hardware companies. Integrators should all take that to heart, because if they want to participate, they need to follow this trend by making sure the value they provide to customers is software-driven rather than hardware-driven.”

He added that a second implication for integrators is that many frontline salespeople are great at selling hardware, but not as much with software. “Integrators need to be able to have salespeople who are comfortable selling software,” he said.

Devin Love, VP of Global Software Platforms for Allegion, acknowledged software and AI’s growing role but emphasized hardware’s essential role: “Hardware is the lifeblood of our industry. The AI brain is so hungry to interact with the real, physical world, and you need the hardware in place for that interaction. There’s no getting around that.”

Go-to-Market Changes

Eric Yunag, Convergint’s EVP of Products and Services, capped the panel with a presentation on the fundamental shift in integration business models. “Last year’s headline megatrend was the evolution of the channel, which really described kind of an underlying friction that was emerging in a lot of the traditional business models that helps move all these new technologies [and software] into end-user environments,” he said.

“The channel has served us all very well – it has been the backbone of this industry for decades,” Yunag added. “It was originally designed as a linear process: Shrink-wrapped software and pieces of hardware in boxes. But as you start listening to all of these technology trends that are accelerating and emerging, and this incredibly dynamic ecosystem of things that are beginning to solve problems in different ways, you’re starting to see a fraying of that traditional straight line to market. We’re in the process of an evolution from a linear channel model to much more of a value chain-oriented construct.”

Yunag elaborated on this concept, saying the change for integrators has gone from recommending and installing products to consultatively identifying the outcomes that end-customers are trying to achieve.

“At the end of the day, we’re sitting in this room with the collective leadership of our industry, with a responsibility to think about how we should collaborate differently to solve these problems for end-users,” he said. “Our job is to come together to help our end-users that we all serve to secure their environments, deal with the dynamic risks that are out there, meet those stakeholder expectations, and help them navigate all this technology change…not just sell products.”