...and Now For Something Completely Different

...Having launched this blog twice; now I'd like to talk about security. Specifically (3) things; the recession, how we have held up in the face of the recession and finally how people are finding the money currently being spent in the Big Three verticals: Education; Healthcare and Government. Today we'll talk about the recession.

Last week our senior team met with Frost & Sullivan in order to get greater industry insight into our strategic planning for the ISC brand in the coming year - in the hopes that our forecasts would be more accurate for 2010 than they were for 2009. The Frost & Sullivan team shared that they are seeing indicators that reflect a strengthening of GDP in the fall of 2009, and assuming a slight lag, we would begin realizing 'recovery' in the security industry as early as Q4 of this year. While this was good news; I'm paid to be pessimistic (as my team would attest) and questioned recovery so soon.

That same day I read separate articles quoting chief economists with both IHS Global Insight and Standard and Poor's; with IHS predicting that we are 'two to three months away from an upturn' and S&P predicting that we see 'a bottom in the fall.....there's a lot of risk to that.' USA Today's John Waggoner reported that seven of the eleven economic outlook index indicators are positive, further supporting the feeling that we will see recovery in 2009.

With that said, in the events business we have the opportunity to not only look at indicators, but to speak to companies. We have a team of people speaking to manufacturers daily, discussing not only their participation in our ISC events, but the state of their business. What we are hearing - still, is from a lot of hard working people who, like the rest of us, were caught by surprise by the economic collapse last fall and are not comfortable making any long term investment until they see the signs of a bottoming out or recovery. The feeling being that while the analysts' news is optimistic, unfortunately, it is hard to run your business from that perspective in June 2009.

We do know that RFQs and RFPs seem to be increasing in the installer and integrator segments; telling us that customers are anticipating the funding for upgrades to existing systems or complete enterprise solutions. And the indicators are there that we may see this funding before the end of the year.

But as the nature of our business is one-to-one conversations, tell me - what do you think?

Ed Nichols
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