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 who or what they consider their biggest competition for 2025.

SDM: What do you view as your company’s greatest competition in 2025?

Kathleen Ford: For us as a small business that does work across the United States, I think the challenge is competing against large nationals. That’s a challenge because we don’t have the budget on the marketing side or the name recognition. We do self-perform most of our own work, so we really consider ourselves an all-in-one agile solution with competitive pricing; but sometimes when you’re bumping against those well-known industry names, that in many cases can be a challenge for us. We consider ourselves small and mighty, but I would say without naming any particular names, that’s our greatest competition.

Greg Parker: First of all, I’d like to say we do admire many of our competitors including Advanced Security and ScDataCom. I think that there’s a lot of value in being highly focused and agile. So as we look across some of the competitors, that creates a dynamic for us to say how can a large company like JCI become more agile? We know who the big players are and we understand that roughly 80 percent of the market is probably a regional integrator. However, when we think about the customers, our biggest challenge is how do we better equip our customers and create value for those customers with tools and information that they need, particularly with connected security?

Connected security could be an opportunity not only for JCI but perhaps even for the dynamics of the market itself. Part of that is how do we demonstrate the value of that offering? We have some customers that are a bit more on the frontier and also some that aren’t quite ready for that. And I think as you look across those folks like us that are in the market, we have probably all experienced that at different degrees, right? How do you develop an offering that may go after a certain vertical market? Who am I going to compete with in that vertical market? And taking yet another look at it and saying, well it’s not just the vertical market but the market segment, which sometimes pulls in geography, but also is it light commercial or is it mid-market or up-market? Obviously with a focus on buildings, we really don’t play so much in the residential space, which is perhaps a little different than some of our competition as well.

Chuck Petrusha: I’m going to take a little different twist on this one because I’m going say that my biggest — or the security industry’s biggest — competitor in 2025 is going to be tertiary competitors, meaning that there are only so many dollars around today. And when you’re building this home with the current rate of inflation and what’s happened to the dollar value the last few years, we’re competing against the upgraded dishwasher. We’re competing against the landscaping. We’re competing against the carpet versus the tile. And so rather than pinpoint a specific competitor — and we all know who those are — I think truly my biggest competitor in 2025 will be that of a tertiary competitor, meaning there’s only so many dollars that the homeowner has to spend and where are they going to use those dollars or spend that dollars as they build the building?

And, by the way, a two-by-four in a business is the same as a new two-by-four in a home. I think in the business sector, you’re going to face the exact same thing. There are only so many dollars and with the inflation that we faced across the United States and really around the world the last few years, everything is more expensive.