Steelbox Catches My Eye And An Award

How about that Steelbox?! For those of you who weren't at the ISC show, you missed a real treat.  Here it is my very first award for best exhibit of the show goes to Steelbox.

BEST OF SHOW

The booth was interestingly different, and every moment you spent near the booth forced your mind to view the world a little differently.  And that must have been the point, because the steelbox products are a very different way of approaching video transmission and storage.  The kickass solution was built by the same engineers who built the amazing PIX firewall for Cisco back in the 90's. I predict that Steelbox will be a disruptive competitor to several categories of technologies:

DVRs like Dedicated Micros DS2

NVRs like Verint Nextiva

Media Platforms like Broadware

The trouble with products like Steelbox, and the biggest inhibitor to the company's success, will be these many fronts on which to do battle.  Instead of a couple of NVR competitors, Steelbox is about to face competition from DVR, NVR, Video transmission solutions, and even proprietary systems from Avigilon or CoVi.  I'll be here providing the play-by-play.  Stay tuned.

Comments

[John Honovich]

Hi Steve,

I agree with your point about Steelbox as a disruptive competitor to Broadware. Approach seem similar but architecure seems much less complex.

Steelbox is certainly impressive in its engineering elgance and it could be a major threat to Broadware and perhaps Verint.

However, I don't think even Steelbox is targeting or would be competing with DVRs such as Dedicated Micros.

Their value proposition seems to be far apart.

Dedicated Micros serves the portion of the market that wants low cost, reliable, basic service. You can get a 16 channel box for $3,000 with a 3 year warranty. That means a lot of small and medium size business needs.

By contrast, Steelbox is a carrier class solution offering RAID standard and options for ATM OC-3 and OC-12 interfaces. This is very expensive and requires huge networks that many security organizations won't have for years.

Steelbox markets on their websites to casions, governments and transportations, all verticals that could effectively digest such scale and cost. I think this is smart.

I don't think they have a shot at the segment of the market that DVRs such as Dedicated Micros serves because of the huge differential in cost and problems solved. And given their public marketing, I don't think this is even their focus.

Does this make sense to you, Steve?

Best,

John

[Steve Hunt]

John,
I heard strong clues that Steelbox's plans a SOHO appliance! Low cost, high performance.

No it probably won't have all the bells and whistles of a sweet DM box, but it would serve the small business need very well.

[John Honovich]

Hi Steve,

What small business needs would it meet exactly?

What cost structure could they deliver product at?

My experience is that SOHO prioritizes low cost, ease of use and remote viewing.

Steelbox is a company that "combine[s] high-speed switching with powerful video indexing and networked storage technologies to provide robust, highly scaleable systems, purpose-built to deliver real time video distribution, storage and retrieval for mission-critical applications"

It's hard to optimize multiple solutions around different market with divergent value and cost needs.

I am sure someone suggested this to you but is this really realistic for them to achieve?

To me, this is not about Steelbox. It is a general point about any company and, more relevantly, young companies.

Best,

John

[John Honovich]

Hi Steve,

What small business needs would it meet exactly?

What cost structure could they deliver product at?

My experience is that SOHO prioritizes low cost, ease of use and remote viewing.

Steelbox is a company that "combine[s] high-speed switching with powerful video indexing and networked storage technologies to provide robust, highly scaleable systems, purpose-built to deliver real time video distribution, storage and retrieval for mission-critical applications"

It's hard to optimize multiple solutions around different market with divergent value and cost needs.

I am sure someone suggested this to you but is this really realistic for them to achieve?

To me, this is not about Steelbox. It is a general point about any company and, more relevantly, young companies.

Best,

John