Tyco Security Products (TSP) is one of the largest electronic security companies in the world with profound capabilities in areas as diverse as home automation, video surveillance and enterprise integration.
AFTER multiple new hires, Bill Sakellariou, VP sales ANZ, says he’s satisfied the expanded TSP team is now properly resourced to take the company’s product range to the Australian and New Zealand market. Meeting the team in Melbourne recently, it was hard not to agree with him.
Spending time with a team in the formative stages of gelling is always informative. Alongside the good humour and ribbing you always get from former competitors and old acquaintances, there’s a lot of respect for the company’s product range around the table. There’s also plenty of respect between new and old team members. Each of these guys has been around a long time and is in the prime of their careers. Just as important, they bring subtly different skillsets to the table.
Listening to the talk I can’t help feeling that TSP is an interesting study. Under the TSP umbrella are multiple old and famous global brands including exacqVision, Kantech, DSC, CEM, Software House and American Dynamics – whose functionalities have been polished by the relentless lapidary of operational demand over decades. In Australia, the company’s brands are known but despite their longevity and lateral capability, they’re not recognised as the powerhouse global solutions that they are. The customer base reflects that truth. TSP has more instantly recognisable enterprise-level customers globally than any local competitor.
What’s interesting about the task the TSP team faces is that much of the ground work has already been done. Despite operating under the radar with limited material support, TSP solutions are installed in telcos, logistics companies, defence and government, healthcare facilities and educational institutions across Australia. Tyco products have been installed in Australia for much longer than people realise, and the product spread is massive. Just as an example, TSP has 14 airports running CEM access control solutions across the Pacific and Telstra has been a C-Cure client since the 1990s.
The TSP Team
TSP’s newly expanded team includes Nic DeAngelis, Michael Bragg, Jason Barcock, Basil Delimitros, Darren Edmondson, Chris Whiting and Scott Whitehead. There are plenty of familiar faces here and there’s serious seniority, too. This is an experienced team that has proved itself in the long game – there’s not going to be any time-consuming cutting of teeth – the TSP crew is already running hard at clear goals.
Nic De Angelis launched his career in the electronic security industry as control room operator. He has worked for ADT, worked in distribution in 2000 starting with Security Merchants and remained there for 10 years doing everything from national warehousing, international purchasing, internal sales, then advanced to state manager.
“I left Security Merchants in 2010 and did 2 years as state manager for a local installation company doing nurse call, radio paging and security,” De Angelis explains. “I was convinced to return to ASSA ABLOY and spent 3 years in the specification team – then about 3 years ago, I was attracted by Tyco’s product spread and joined up – a merger made Tyco TSP.”
Michael Bragg joined the security industry in 2000 – he started his career with Sensormatic selling retail EAS systems, then after ADT’s acquisition ran his own business selling early Intellex solutions in the hospitality market. Next, he went to the UK and worked for a security company partnering with police, experienced significant commercial success winning a massive CCTV solution in the food production industry. Bragg then returned to Australia, worked for a nurse call company for 4 years, then Bosch Security for 4 years, then joined a well-respected distributor.
“I wanted to return to manufacturing, and this is an interesting challenge – TSP has market-leading products that are globally recognised but Australia is unaware of them,” Bragg says. “We need to let Australian market know our capabilities – we secure companies like Facebook, Google and the U.S. Pentagon and we have huge customer base locally – it’s time to talk about that.”
Jason Barcock is an application and pre-sales engineer with 20 years of experience. Like the others he’s worked his way up, first as an apprentice sparky, He then went to the UK for gap year and stayed for 13 years, learned the C-Cure enterprise access control solutions and returned to Australia and worked for an integrator selling Tyco products, including C-Cure.
“I then joined Tyco Security Products, went to another integrator and then returned to Tyco around 5 years ago,” Barcock says.
Meanwhile, Basil Delimitros has 28 years electronic security industry experience, Delimitros worked his way up through the ranks and found himself at Hills after the acquisition of LAN-1. The roles he’s had over the years include sales and product/vendor management. According to Delimitros he was looking for a new opportunity.
“That’s what TSP brings – the ability to sell everything from CCTV to access control, alarm systems and everything in between,” he says. “There’s also the chance to build something big from the ground up. It’s exciting times.”
Darren Edmondson started out working for Signature which was bought out by ADT, and he put in 14 years’ service there. Next, he worked for Paul-Tec Security in operations, worked with Anytime Fitness Australia and Asia, then moved to Hills in the enterprise space as an account manager and after success there, decided to work for a manufacturer.
“While I wanted to work for a large manufacturer, I did not really understand the scale – I did not know much about TSP’s products until I arrived here and never realised how big TSP was,” Edmondson says.
Scott Whitehead has been in the industry for 25 years. He started out with Ademco, then went to Rexel and Panasonic.
“I also put in stints with a couple of integrators, joined Tyco 9 years ago – firstly in sales and business development and basically every other hat as there were only 2 of us,” Whitehead says. “Then around 4.5 years ago, I moved across to the APAC trainer role – we have some really great products here and it’s excellent to have a strong team to sell and support them.”
Next is Chris Whiting, who has been GM of Hills in NZ for last few years. Prior to this he was GM of sales with Armouguard and he has plenty of experience in manned services, cash in transit and patrols. He’s worked for Tyco, run ADT’s residential small business team and importantly, he’s also worked for an integrator. Whiting’s is an important appointment. You can’t do business in New Zealand without boots on the ground. Whiting is passionate about the security business and approaches it from an operational perspective.
TSP Round Table
Chatting to the team around the table I get a strong sense of their commitment to brands they recognise as being market leaders at the global level, not only locally.
“One of our access control solutions – a small one – is on par with local systems that are considered large,” says De Angelis. “And we have 3 access control solutions. It’s the same with intrusion and the same with CCTV. We have multiple major product lines, and each has thousands of parts – there’s just an enormous amount of data to be absorbed and re-transmitted to people over and over. In the past we’ve not had the resources, but things are changing. The way you build a brand is one person at a time – you do it 1000 times. We need to undertake this process across all our products – it’s a massive task.
“The scope of the business is so much greater than the market realises. People don’t realise that we probably have more DSC panels installed in Australia every month than any other manufacturer of alarm systems. It is a significantly large number of DSC panels every month – no one knows it because those panels are not branded DSC. We dominate in many parts of the market and we have for a long time. We have quietly built this business and not talked about it – TSP is a sleeping giant.”
“The other thing is that we as an organisation set some high bars for C-Cure partners – we require really high levels of competency. When an SI is doing work for one of the big multinationals we look after, the feedback we would get is what value is the distributor bringing – they are simply taking a margin for moving a box that we may as well buy directly from the source. It’s difficult to make the case to high-end integrators that a distribution model works best for them – we need a mixed model, because we have a mixed client base.”
Meanwhile, Delimitros says the team is sympathetic to the challenges of distribution.
“We’ve all worked in distribution and we know the pressures SIs can place on distributors,” he explains. “We are going to use all our combined knowledge to give the best experience to our partners – be they consultant, distributor, systems integrator, end user. When you look at the size and scope of TSP’s products – and I’ve competed against these products in the past – it’s impossible to ignore the size and power of these solutions – they are second to none. In terms of the size of our organisation compared to the competitors, we far outstrip them.”
For Edmondson, service and support will be key as the business goes into a growth phase.
“I think when it comes to servicing customers now with the team that we’ve got – we can handle that more effectively and efficiently,” Edmondson says. “It’s key in this industry and I think we can now provide that thanks to this combination of the existing team and the new team. Our enhanced service and our fast response times – they are things distributors and integrators are going to notice immediately.”
TSP’s 3-Year Plan
Sakellariou’s brief is simple enough – to change the way TSP is perceived locally and to push the business forward by promoting the company’s solutions and offering elevated levels of support. But saying a thing in words and delivering it in a competitive market are not the same.
“A small, dedicated team has been flying the flag and step one of our plan has been to bolster the existing team – to add resources capable of delivering real support,” he says. “To that end, I’ve bought serious people on board and I’m confident that they will get the job done.
“We now have national representation – in the past staff have been trying to support multiple complex solutions in the product line at a national level and it hasn’t been effective. A small team has been based in NSW and Victoria and while they’ve tried to cover other states, you need local representation – you just can’t get around that. You need to be able to train security integrators working with complex products and to be available to support them through the planning and installation process. That’s where we are getting to – we want to get the message out there to the grassroots – this is who we are, and these are our products, this is your new level of support.
“Thanks to the expanded team, we now have the flexibility for a team member to go into another state as required for as long as required – we can better support our distributors and we can support major security integrators directly with training and technical expertise,” Sakellariou says.
Education is a core aspect of the growth trajectory for TSP.
“As part of the ground work we’ve undertaken, we have training there if we need it and our partners are more engaged because they can see there is more activity from our side as well,” he says.
According to Delimitros, TSP’s strategic acquisitions significantly enhance the company’s capabilities and they also expand the narrative around TSP solutions.
“For the new team members coming to the company I think it’s great that we have new things to talk about to people with whom we have trusted relationships – that’s exciting,” he explains. “The market is changing – there are new pieces of functionality that users want. From a CCTV perspective, high level integrations are something that has been desired for a long time but today we are not talking about HLIs. We are talking about pre-integrated solutions – managing compatibility between different technologies – it’s one of the advantages of owning the vertical.
“At TSP, we not only integrate with third parties, we integrate brilliantly with our own solutions – we don’t have issues with integrating access control and CCTV – we don’t have failures because of something mundane like a firmware upgrade. Our integrations work. To integrate 3 technologies and pull out a report from them to a single user interface that’s intuitive and user friendly – it’s what the market is looking for.”
De Angelis agrees.
“Useability is the key,” he explains. “Past a certain point of complexity, you run the risk that the system is too complex to use – we recognised globally this was coming decades ago and started a programme to resolve the issues. Once you’ve linked multiple systems together what you get is a vast complicated system and you’ve got to trim it down because if an end user can’t operate that system, they won’t value it. Then there’s the fact if you upgrade one system, you must upgrade the other. Your libraries must link correctly.
According to De Angelis TSP’s ability to integrate functionalities filters all the way through the company’s solutions – from enterprise level to SME and residential markets.
“We work to put power in your hand through connected homes and subscription-based alarm services – solutions like Qolsys IQ panel 2 – that’s one of ours,” he explains. “People love that control, but they don’t want to pay for more than they need. Think about the old model of 10 years ago – an alarm panel costing one dollar a day for monitoring. What response do you get? The monitoring station can’t send a guard if they can’t see an intruder. But now you can get an alert on your phone – you can turn on a light, see who is there, speak to the person, grant them access, request assistance from police – you have power in your hand – at TSP, that’s what we deliver.”
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