Security Sales & Integration May 2022 - 24

EXCLUSIVE!
Executive Interview
Interface Insights
guard monitoring solution, where we can interact
directly with our clients' store environments.
We then had an uptick in demand for
business analytics solutions. That's been anything
from, " Hey, I need to know how many
folks are in my store at any given time. Of the
number of folks in my store, how many of
those are converting into an actual sale? How
long are people waiting online? If they are waiting,
are folks bailing out in a line because they
get frustrated? What displays are they spending
the most time at? " etc.
AI is
incorporated into
the business
analytics solutions
where we're doing
everything from
monitoring footfall
to traffic count to
point of sale
exception
reporting, which is
a really big one for
our customers.
- Sean Foley, SVP
Enterprise Security
During the lockdown period and slowing
of the economy, can you speak to the
fortuitous business model that had more
than 90% of your clientele tied to
recurring revenue services that helped
keep cash flowing?
Duncan: Yes, that allowed us to hunker down a
bit. That's the beauty of an RMR-driven organization.
It allowed us to turn our focus toward
customers and understand what they needed
from us and be in constant communication as
it was evolving. It was a brave new world when
this hit. We were in a good position to deal
with it and help. Aside from that, as a business
model, our customers love the predictability.
There's a flat rate monthly fee that's all-inclusive
of the services we deliver and manage. For
them it's a highly predictable OPEX expense,
not capital intensive. It allows bringing all of
these products and services together in a financially
appealing manner.
What is growth looking like for 2022,
and how does that compare to pre- and
post-pandemic years?
Duncan: In 2020, we had reimagined our goto-market
organization and how we aligned the
teams, making sure our brand and value proposition
was clear. We did a lot right before the
pandemic to put that in place. We launched
a new tech stack, new CRM platform, lots of
tools to enable the go-to-market org. Then in
March, everything shut down. We at least got
that in place ahead of the pandemic. In 2021,
we saw a significant rise in customers adding
managed services as well as a 37% increase in
sales. This year we're forecasting a 55% increase
in sales. We've seen two consecutive strong
quarters and we expect to exceed sales targets
by roughly 25%. We're forecasting meeting or
exceeding our growth numbers in 2022.
Looking deeper into Interface's solutions
and services, to what extent are you
implementing artificial intelligence? Is
it augmenting or even replacing human
monitoring personnel?
Foley: We are actively incorporating AI into
our virtual guard monitoring operation; it's going
to be a game-changer. You're either incorporating
analytics and AI into your solutions
or you're falling behind at this stage. We're at
an inflection point with AI, both in terms of
general AI capabilities at the video level, Cloud
computing, and most importantly, processing
power. Those three things are coming together
for us and allowing us to offer a whole new
suite of solutions to our customers and, most
importantly, solutions that contain actual data
that either they can act upon or that we within
our monitoring operations can act upon.
That can be as simple as in our monitoring
operation, whether a person is present as opposed
to a random object that should not be
there at a given time. Is there a vehicle present
that should not be there as opposed to just a
dumb motion detection type of event? Can we
" Our focus and breadth of service end up being significant differentiators in the market, as well as our
reputation, " says Interface COO Brent Duncan.
24
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