Steve Galloway
(Editor’s note: Last week’s interview with Steve Galloway of ESP continues with a rundown on new products for the dealer channel, why dealers should consider partnering with ESP, trends affecting future product offerings, and what the industry can expect to hear from ESP over the next 6-12 months.
The dealer channel has discovered that you can help them better manage some of the devices they’re selling and you’ve got some new products that extend those capabilities. Tell me about them?
Galloway: Dealers who we work with on their MPS have asked if we could help them with an energy management capability. So we launched the first of its kind eCommandCenter [a platform that empowers businesses to control plug-level energy consumption, protect equipment, and implement sustainability programs] in conjunction with our surge protection. We just signed an order in excess of over $150,000 wholesale with a dealer who is bringing this solution into one of his big customers. This is an annuity stream because it has licenses. Dealers and OEM’s can charge for set up as a service and go in and meet with the customer on a quarterly basis to show them their energy usage and run reports for them.
There’s a lot of independent research data out there and we’ve found that about 70 percent of the time the end user turns off the energy saving mode on the equipment because they don’t want to sit there and wait for the fuser to warm up to make that image. Customers also turn off energy saving modes on PC’s. That’s what we’re finding with this solution.
Again, I go back to the IT community, they don’t want to use up a lot of their bandwidth with all these other offerings. ESP’s eCC platform doesn’t use up bandwidth or IP addresses since it is based on Zigby wireless technology, and we’re seeing people get interested in it in the IT space along with our imaging dealers and OEMs.
We’ve done the same thing with SurgeX new IP control capability. It’s a different technology. It’s Web enabled and has an IP address. You can use it to control your speakers and flat panels at the plug level. You can have it on your iPad and use it to turn on and off things here while you’re in London, for example.
The key with energy management and high-level data is that a lot of work has been done over the years with HVAC and lighting to save energy in the building. What’s left is the equipment and plug-level energy use, which is about 30 percent of the energy used in a building. We can now give the customer, the OEM, and our dealer partners the capability to understand how that energy is being used. Our ESP and SurgeX solutions measure actual usage, not an estimate or algorithm used to model device usage.
Why should a BTA dealer partner with ESP?
Galloway: Studies by Industry Analysts and Buyers Laboratory have shown that we have the overall best technology for let-through energy, surge protection, EMI/RFI noise and interference filtering (CAT5e and CAT 6 network protection) with our devices. The new enVision line with diagnostics and an integrated scope meter capability for the service community has gained a lot of traction in our preliminary customer conversations. We are bringing them totally new solutions and capabilities to grow their business within imaging, audio-visual, IT, security and sustainability/MPS.
The star of course is our technology. As important, and we’re all in business to make money, is because of our lifetime warranty. If something happens to our device and an imaging unit gets damaged we stand behind that product and we will either fix it or replace it. It’s a value add for imaging dealers to offer our connected warranty and ‘piece of mind’ to their customer. The dealer can then add this to the lease and get a nice profit stream.
If you think about it, most of the imaging devices are on a lease and depending on the technology and what they want to offer to their customer, the lease payment can be $3 to $4.50. That’s a fairly decent conversation to have with the customer. It’s a great insurance policy and we are all familiar with that concept. The dealer gets their revenue and profit up front because they’re going through a leasing concern. That’s a nice value add to them and we’ve lowered their service expenses and we better their customer experience – everyone wins.
Plus, we have an experienced team in the imaging space. Our team will come out and train a dealer’s service technicians. When they’re working large deals, they’ll do joint calls with the dealer to explain why a customer would want to use this surge protection or the new technologies we now offer. We are not the cheapest product out there, but we are offer the best technology portfolio and we have 85 percent market share.
What trends are you watching that will have an effect on your future product offerings?
Galloway: Two trends—technical and sales. Whether you’re in the IT business, whether you’re in the digital display business, or whether you’re in the imaging business, there’s this view that these devices have become less susceptible to surges, spikes, and noise in the office. Quite the contrary, the power of some of these devices is higher than four, five or six computers inside of them, so they are very susceptible to power anomalies. The electronics are more sophisticated and are being compacted into smaller spaces.
The other thing you see is all this technology in the office—imaging devices, servers, PCs, refrigerators, heaters under employee’s desks. There’s a lot of draw on these circuits and a lot of these buildings weren’t designed to handle that. We just finished a study of real power anomalies in four major metropolitan areas and anomalies averaged over 40 per month on a branch circuit. What we’ve done to improve the technology over the last few years is to provide less let-through energy, better noise protection, more noise filtering, and the capability to understand what’s happening in that building with hard facts and data due to the smart nature and recording capabilities of our technology.
Whether you have an imaging device, a server, or some other kind of high-end electronic device running your business, most of them, have a switch- mode power supply. And a switch-mode power supply, whether in the server or in the imaging device or other electronics, is susceptible to surges, and spikes.
The other thing we’re seeing is this convergence with the IT departments who are now responsible for the imaging devices, the IT equipment, and the AV equipment. You think about my old company and our executive conference room. That was recently managed by facilities and now it is switching to IT since everything is networked, so we have capabilities to enable that and protect the audio-visual devices.
Although people, frankly, when you talk to them don’t want to pay for it, there’s a lot of interest in the sustainability space and how much energy they’re using and where can they do better. We’ve seen IT people use our eCommandCenter to justify equipment upgrades. Those are the two or three things we’re looking out at into the future to engage the IT services business of our OEM partners and then try to help our dealers understand that business model and market.
What can we expect to hear out of ESP over the next 6-12 months?
Galloway: An expansion of our IT server line, additional sophistication in our surge and noise protection and integration with OEM platforms. We want to take our technology and push it into that system to enable service providers to do remote Tier 1 or Tier 2 support by understanding whether anomalies are causing the customer issue. We will soon have new remote access and communication capabilities.
If the customer calls and says their machine is down, they can access our unit remotely to see if it’s a surge, a spike, whether they have a brownout or SAG. This integration of communication with improvements in the technology is something we’ve shown at tradeshows. We’re coming out with enVision, which is a power conditioning system with advanced diagnostics and scope meter capabilities. We’ll be launching that in the third quarter.
The other thing you’ll see is an expansion of the energy management solutions we have at the plug level. We recently launched a network management and appliance/device manager system called Cervella that can overlay a dealer’s or OEM’s service dispatch system to see other things on the network, but more importantly, control other things on the network with this technology. This technology is encrypted, offers secure access management and single user password control at the administrator level. They can set up their service communities easier, they can control device access management easier, and they can manage other things on the network other than imaging devices. We’re showing that to the OEMs.
You can also expect to see more new technology, more sustainability and green, and more network capabilities. We’re still going after our core business in the audio visual and imaging space, but we are now taking our technology and offering it to non-imaging communities where they see a value in protecting their mission critical electronics that are the life-blood of their business and operations.
At ESP-SurgeX we will continue to invest heavily in technology and platforms to help our partners grow their businesses, lower their service expenses, and improve their customer experience.
