Editor’s Note: Another version of this article originally appeared on our sister-site Security Sales & Integration on August 7, 2026. It has since been updated for Commercial Integrator’s audience.
For 20 years, every manufacturer in this industry sold integrators the same dream: the single pane of glass. One interface to rule them all. We put it in our proposals, we showcased it in the conference room and we all quietly knew the truth.
It was never really a single pane — and it was never really the customer’s. It was the manufacturer’s pane, built the way the product team imagined a generic user might work. The customer got a compromise with a logo on it.
That era is over. The winning integrators of now and over the next five years won’t be selling anybody’s pane of glass. They’ll be building the customer’s.
The IT Threat Is Real, But So Is Our Moat
Let’s start with the uncomfortable part. IT companies are walking into our accounts right now, and they’re not carrying ladders; they’re carrying code. They’ve spent a decade living in APIs, middleware and cloud infrastructure and they look at a modern video surveillance platform the way we look at a panel swap. Familiar territory.
Access control still gives them fits, with its wiring, fail-safe versus fail-secure decisions and code requirements, but don’t count on that lasting forever.
Here’s the flip side nobody’s saying out loud. LLMs (Claude, Codex and the like) just did to coding what the cordless drill did to hand tools. The IT crowd’s moat — the ability to write custom integrations — can now be crossed by anyone willing to learn how to direct these tools.
Their advantage is evaporating. Ours isn’t. Nobody is prompting their way through a 400-door enterprise deployment. Nobody is remotely coding a camera onto a pole in a parking lot in the middle of winter in Fargo.
The licensing, the life safety expertise, the skilled technician network, the ability to execute deployments at scale and decades of operational know-how. That’s our moat and it’s not going anywhere.
So, the play is simple: keep the moat. Steal their weapon.
Stop Waiting on the Manufacturer’s Roadmap
Step one is choosing manufacturing partners on one non-negotiable criterion: truly open APIs. Not “open” as in a partner program with a toll booth. Open as in documented, accessible and built for us to build on.
When the API is open and code is no longer the bottleneck, we stop waiting on manufacturers to decide which integrations deserve a spot on the road map. Be honest about how that has worked historically.
A feature request usually got built only when a seven-figure deal was attached to it. Everyone else heard “it’s on the road map” until they stopped asking. Now we build it ourselves, for the customer standing in front of us, sized to that customer’s world.
Their Workflow, Their Metrics, Their Pane of Glass
Here’s what that looks like in practice. Your customer doesn’t want to live inside a VMS. They want to run their business. So instead of training their team to fumble through security software, we integrate video and access control directly into the workflows they already use.
Alerts land where they work, not in another app they have to babysit. The system automates the routine and only taps them on the shoulder when a human decision is genuinely required. Silence becomes a feature.
And the data? Every operator says the same thing in different words: just give me the score. They don’t want to mine reports. They want to walk in Monday morning and see the handful of numbers that tell them whether the weekend went sideways.
We pull exactly what matters off the security stack and put it on a clean dashboard built for them. Occupancy, exceptions, after-hours activity, dock-door dwell times — their metrics, their language, their pane of glass.
From Installer to Outcome
This is the real transformation. When we sit down with a customer, map their workflows, their pain points and their objectives, then build custom solutions on open platforms, we stop selling installed products and start delivering outcomes. That’s a managed services relationship. That’s recurring revenue. That’s a customer who can’t imagine replacing you, because you didn’t sell them a system – you built them an operating advantage.
The single pane of glass was always a marketing line. The customer’s pane of glass is a business model. Pick partners who open the door, learn the tools and go build what your customers have been asking for all along.
Nobody is better positioned to deliver it than we are.
Kelsey Kerling is the director of national sales & strategic initiatives at LVC Companies.
