Walk around any security show in the world today — brand new, innovative products can be scarce to find. Due to mediocre global economic recovery and longer life/selling cycles, solution developers have earmarked more resources for sales and marketing promotions of existing offerings, as well as fine-tuning and repurposing/verticalizing them. Making products cheaper and easier to deploy, in a disruptive innovation manner, has become the No. 1 priority for many (especially the big guys).
Walk around any security show in the world today — brand new, innovative products can be scarce to find. Due to mediocre global economic recovery and longer life/selling cycles, solution developers have earmarked more resources for sales and marketing promotions of existing offerings, as well as fine-tuning and repurposing/verticalizing them. Making products cheaper and easier to deploy, in a disruptive innovation manner, has become the No. 1 priority for many (especially the big guys).
It should not be a surprise that traditional security gold mines (higher-end projects in the government and MNC verticals) are as competitive as they can get and are not as lucrative these days. Manufacturers and solution developers, big and small alike, have scrambled to develop new markets, both vertically and geographically. One thing that mid- to low-end vertical segments and emerging economies have in common is the need for price- and user-friendliness.
On the affordability front, industry heavyweights, such as Axis Communications, Bosch Security Systems, Honeywell Security, Milestone Systems, Tyco Security Products and many more, have not shied away from promoting the “Lite version” or “Home edition” of their respective offerings in trade publications, at trade shows or on their own dedicated websites. Take Secutech International 2013 for example. Cost-effective solutions from Tier-2 or Chinese vendors attracted an unusually high amount of foot traffic and eyeballs; many even ran out of their demo samples at the end of Day 2. If one were to use a pharmaceutical analogy, now would be the heyday of generic drugs.
On the simplicity and usability front, those that still do not offer vertical solutions or plug-and-play models are most likely seen as outliers. More hardware devices are packing more heat, or processing power, and can multitask and yield better results, at a lower total cost. Similarly, more management software providers, such as Genetec and Nice Systems, are offering cloud-based or easier-to-deploy models that take the headaches out of struggling integrators or users.
So, the message to take home is disruptive innovation — a term used in business and technology literature to describe innovations that improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically first by designing for a different set of consumers in the new market and later by lowering prices in the existing market.
Growth Engine in Asia
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