"Are you tired of buying switches and routers for your installations that just add more cost and no margin to your project? Tired of having to sell equipment that your customer can buy in any web shop and is designed to be managed by a full IT department? Or just tired of giving it all away to an IT reseller?" asks Arthur C.D. de Jager, Managing Director at Niveo in our interview.
He’s got some good questions there.
We are at the end of the era when a custom installation in the home will center only on an audio system, or on a home theatre, or on a home automation system that controls mostly lights, thermostats and shades. Now, in the IP Era, more and more devices and rooms need to connect up, to network in a seamless concert of control for sound, vision, lighting, security and more.
The internet, the iPod, the tablets, the game consoles, the HDTV, the smartphone—even the digital thermostat, app-controlled lighting, and smart meters all add up to a new age of home IP networks. The transition to IP networking has happened faster in commercial installations but it’s coming home now.
IP networking in custom installations is inevitable. We simply can’t have a home full of devices, with our maximum of content that needs home distribution, without connecting and unifying these disparate devices under network control. The more we connect devices, the more we will want to control everything.
For 2012, already the projected growth of networked devices in homes is staggering: connected TV 52%, wireless MRAV 32%, networked digital media players 28% and NAS 28%.
NIVEO Professional, explains the MD, sells high performance Industrial grade network equipment for professional installers: enterprise grade switches, NAS systems, access points, UPS systems and wireless routers for the integration of IP based custom installations, ranging from typical AV integrations to domotica to digital signage and even to full scale hotel or medical facility installations.
The products are not sold in retail or web stores, but exclusively through the custom install and pro AV channel to give dealers and distributors some margin as well as recurring sales.
According to the CEA, 67% of consumers want a professional installer to set up a home network; another 18% would prefer to install a system themselves, while 9% would prefer “someone else” to do the installation for them. That 9% usually wants a family member or friend to act as an integrator.
Those statistics mean a growing opportunity for integrators. The CE Accelerate initiative by EH Publishing’s Research Department identifies home automation and networking as the largest growth category within Custom Electronics for 2013—predicting double digit growth which is not easy to find these days.
That makes IP Networking not only a must, but a great business opportunity. De Jager’s point is that we sacrifice that opportunity when we draw upon standard retail networking products --one of the lowest profit-margin product types. And these products are not designed with the AV installer in mind.
Enterprise-Grade Networking for residential is one of the top 5 CE opportunities for 2013. But if we surrender it to consumer IT products, we not only lose out on business, but often it’s the customer who suffers. Why risk a high quality AV installation with retail product designed for data-only?
Linked In groups for AV are filled with complaints from professional AV and custom installers who often share jobs with IT installers. The complaints usually follow the same path: the IT attitude is so different than in AV.
The AV person is all about integration, making quality work, getting complicated stuff to interface for the user. Most IT resellers are trained to sell and move on. They tend to be more "That's how it works out of the box, so deal with it. Here's a webinar and on-line instruction resource. Any more questions, then you should Google it. You’ll find user groups."
In AV, we may find it difficult to adapt to doing things like the IT folks do. We hold the user's hands, teach, explain, innovate and expand borders, find solutions. That makes IT folks uncomfortable in many cases when we move into their universe, but it should also make us uncomfortable when we surrender the networking infrastructure to IT.
What Niveo has brought together is a range of networking products that lets AV installers shift networking infrastructure from cost-side of the ledger to margin-generating side.
If an IT person looks at what AV wants to do with a network, they think AV people plug up the network with heavy content, bringing data flow for the whole network to its knees. AV over data networks is “a bit hog” so AV people should have their own special demands about what kind of switches and routers to use-- plus a whole array of other demands that, quite frankly,would drive your average IT department completely crazy.
Fulfilling that need for specialized AV-IT networking gear, Niveo has already attracted and signed up some impressive names in European custom installation: AWE, Soundline, iLED, Doneo and others. And de Jager says Niveo will be at ISE 2013 to discuss the rise of AV-IT networks (and the implications) with installers (as well as distributors in certain markets).
“We’re looking to sign up installers and integrators that can see AV-IP networks are at the tipping point,” notes de Jager. “The type of channel partners we want are those that can see that this trend is a long-lasting shift in the market where IP will dominate the business.”
