SDM spoke with three companies for its Industry Forecast looking back at 2024 and ahead to 2025 on a variety of topics. The panel included Kathleen Ford, co-owner and CEO of ScDataCom, a Savannah, GA-based security integration company specializing in federal contracts; Chuck Petrusha, president and CEO of Advanced Security Systems, Eureka, CA, a full-service alarm company and past SDM Dealer of the Year; and Greg Parker, global vice president, security and fire, life cycle management at Johnson Controls, Glendale, WI, a well-known large international integration company.

Below the panel talked about sales opportunities, from vertical markets to specific technology demands for 2025.

SDM: What are the products and services driving customers to purchase or upgrade their systems in 2025?

Chuck Petrusha: What’s going to be driving most of it will be compliance, right? So in building a new building, what is going to keep us compliant? What is going to lower our risk?

We’ve tried to evolve from fire alarms to term them life safety systems. Throughout the building these are going be required in most cases. And then what’s going lower our risk? Well, of course, to buy insurance in this world you need all the tools in place to lower your rates, such as the security system; and to lower the liability, a surveillance system.

Greg Parker: I think in the coming year — of course this will vary by vertical market and even market segments — in general, we’ll see a lot of movement around access control; video, for different reasons, but in particular around how video is being leveraged as a sensor and the platforms that that video is being run on; then when I look across the life safety side, and to Chuck’s point, compliance in particular on that side and regulatory issues, those things that are changing as we speak.

For example, NFPA 915 at least opens the door to a degree of remote inspections. And as that’s colored in over the next few years, I think that changes the landscape a bit as to how we have thought about fire detection, historically. Of course, there’s a lot that remains to be seen and a lot that we have to at least be in in the river of information and flow so that we can react quickly enough. And lastly, I do still believe that there’s even more big opportunities around the hybrid managed services model to leverage not only AI into our methods of how we monitor and how we proactively identify insights for customers, but how we respond to that with actual human beings in the middle.

Kathleen Ford: I agree with what I’ve heard about compliance, and I think that’s a driver in our industry for sure. So in the access control space, there’s a drive towards FICAM compliance for those agencies that don’t already have compliance systems now. I think that there’s opportunity there and we’ll continue to roll out FICAM compliance solutions for some of those customers that require them. In the Department of Veteran’s Affairs in particular, in the video space, they have compliance documents that many facilities aren’t compliant with, so they’re driving specs and solicitations to fill those gaps.

But I think there’s another piece here at play that is an opportunity for all of us, which is that we’re selling some pretty cool technology that just keeps getting cooler and people want the shiny object. When they hear what is possible, they want it. So I see less pressure in the commercial and public sector as far as spending the dollars somewhere else. I find that we’re really in a sweet spot of cool, innovative technologies. The AI-driven opportunity here is to really provide something that they want and then you cloak that in life safety and security, which is the perfect dressing for something to have people commit dollars to. So I think that there are compliance-driven things and there are new shiny object things that just make their life easier, which is a win-win. I’m not suggesting that we’re providing something they don’t need. I think we have the opportunity to provide something they very much do need, but it sells itself in that it’s just very attractive. So I think that there’s huge opportunity there for that.