Let’s be honest. The concept of integration firms doing a better job of providing customers with valuable analytics based on system usage and interaction will not be one of the lingering takeaways from InfoComm 2017. But it should be. And my conversation with Rodolfo Saccoman, CEO and co-founder of AdMobilize, reinforces that.
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It’s easy to dismiss AdMobilize, a provider of analytics software including its new Crowd Analytics Platform, as a solution for retail and public spaces markets. Saccoman, however, sees logical applications in corporate, hospitality and most markets. Use of facial recognition software can trigger, well, anything a programmer wants it to trigger.
A crowd analytics solution deployed in a corporate lobby, for instance, can recognize individual employees when they enter the building. Say it’s somebody’s birthday, Saccoman offered. “You can create a ‘happy birthday’ app that wishes her a happy birthday and shows appreciation.” On a more business-oriented level, he said, crowd analytics can measure the mood of the team — a metric that may translate to productivity.
It’s easy for me to write that integration firms ought to be providing their customers with valuable metrics that help them improve their businesses. It’s easy for me to argue that doing so will boost integrators’ ability to sell service contracts, managed services and generally improve the client-integrator relationship.
TD Podcast: Listen to my interview with AdMobilize’s Rodolfo Saccoman
I don’t have to actually do it. Meanwhile, the reality is that not many integrators are actually selling or providing analytics to their customers.
There are plenty of folks in the industry talking and writing about providing business metrics to customers. We’ve written about it. One of the coolest-sounding educational sessions at Infocomm 2017 focused on it.
CI’s editorial staff, however, has found it challenging to find integrators that can share first-hand experience.
Analytics Become More Important
AdMobilize, however, isn’t the only manufacturer emphasizing how important that data is becoming to integration customers. Think Crestron Fusion. Kramer, which is shipping Kramer Control as of InfoComm 2017, indicates that data capture is vital.
“Data is the four letter word that we believe is the commodity of the future,” said COO Clint Hoffman while describing the benefits of Kramer Control prior to infoComm 2017. Kramer Control captures system data for the customer “automatically and uploads to the cloud,” he said. “The data that you want is there from day one without the cost for programming.”
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When he refers to “the data you want” he’s really referring to the data that integration customers increasingly want. In a world driven by Google Analytics there is increasingly an expectation that we can measure how engaged our customers are with our products, how long they stay engaged and what actions they take as a result of being engaged.
Customers crave that data, according to Saccoman. He says AdMobilize provides a dashboard what he nicknamed the Google Analytics of crowd analytics.
While InfoComm 2017 won’t go down as the show when the importance of providing customer analytics took hold, I’m hoping that the industry embraces that premise in the near future.
