A broader base of competition, margin erosion, and pressure on end user budgets all played their part on performance, but integrators experienced enough opportunities to counter those impediments to growth.
While there has been no shortage of market pressures and disruptive influences on the security business lately, systems integrators nonetheless performed well last year. As a group, the integrators encapsulated in SDM’s 2015 Top Systems Integrators Report didn’t show much growth — just 0.3 percent. But that had more to do with the structure of the report than with the companies’ individual accomplishments in 2014. For example, 16 of the top 25 integrators for which year-to-year comparisons could be made, as well as many of the lower-ranked integrators, reported significant revenue increases. However, there was one significant change (the removal of Siemens Industry Inc., due to SDM’s inability to obtain reliable financial data for creation of an estimate), which resulted in a shift in aggregate figures for the integrators as a whole, as well as a shift in ranking on the Top Systems Integrators Report for many of them.
SDM’s Top Systems Integrators Report ranks companies by their North American systems integration revenue, which includes solutions such as design, project management, product, installation, programming, start-up, and training sold directly to an end-user customer or through a tier of contractors. Total North American revenue from systems integration reached $6.83 billion in 2014 for the 110 companies ranked on this year’s report. However, a comparison between the top 100 companies ranked this year and the top 100 ranked last year shows a 7.1 percent decline, much of which can be attributed to the omission of Siemens Industry Inc. as stated above.