Verkada taps into new markets with their Hologram-powered cellular gateways
—Max Shen, Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Verkada
“Partnering with Hologram was definitely the right decision for our team. It allowed us to get to market much faster.”
Max Shen
Sr. Product Marketing Manager, Verkada
Innovation is a word that gets thrown around so often that it’s become a buzzword. Here’s a story of true innovation in action – where a smart company saw an opportunity, made a quick build or buy decision, and opened up a whole new market with significant revenue potential.
With 26,000 customers across 85 countries, Verkada has a huge footprint in the physical security industry with video security cameras, access control, environmental sensors, and alarm products, all managed via their cloud-based software platform. Increasingly their customers sought to add their services in areas that were remote with no internet access or in areas challenging to hardwire.
“It was amazing to see the new use cases our customers were coming to us for, like expansive outdoor loading docks and remote trails. Obviously, laying cables in the forest isn’t feasible and tearing up parking lots is costly,” noted Max Shen, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Verkada. “We needed to be able to deploy anywhere without relying on network infrastructure.”
That brought Verkada to a decision point. To give clients this flexibility, they needed to connect their devices with a cellular gateway. But, should they use a commercially available gateway or build something fundamentally better? For Verkada, it wasn’t just a technical decision. It was holding to the company’s principle of making things simple for their customers. They decided that building their own cellular gateway was the only way to make it as easy to use and install as their other products.
Next, they had to decide how they would connect this cellular gateway - carrier or MVNO? They outlined what they needed from their connectivity solution to make it simple for both customers and their own internal development and operations teams:
Hologram met every criteria – one global SIM that delivers high performance and guaranteed uptime with the new Outage Protection capability. Plus, the entire fleet of devices could be managed globally in the Hologram Dashboard.
“When we listed everything we needed to keep our solution easy for both our customers and internal teams, it became clear that Hologram’s Cellular IoT Outage Protection SIMs had the simplicity and flexibility we needed to quickly get to market.”
– Max Shen, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Verkada
With Hologram Cellular IoT powering their gateways, the use cases for Verkada’s customers have expanded significantly into parking lots, loading docks, warehouses, ATMs, streetlights, and more. By enabling their customers to deploy in more places, Verkada can tap into additional revenue from their existing base and attract net new customers.
“Remote and outdoor deployments are among the most challenging for customers. Our gateway solution enabled by Hologram’s Cellular IoT Outage Protection SIMs makes it more likely for customers to choose Verkada for their outdoor use cases.”
– Brandon Davito, SVP of Product Management at Verkada
For Verkada, picking Hologram as their Cellular IoT partner is just the start of a successful relationship. With devices now rolled out into the field, Verkada’s priority is keeping devices connected and customers happy. “We have thousands of devices in the field securing mission-critical locations. Hologram’s Outage Protection SIMs deliver high reliability and exceptional performance to meet customer needs,” noted Davito. “In fact, the flexibility that Hologram provides helped us avoid downtime despite AT&T and Verizon outages this year.”
The flexibility that Hologram provides helped us avoid downtime despite AT&T and Verizon outages this year.
In addition to the use cases unlocked by the cellular gateway, Verkada has seen an even more powerful benefit - deal acceleration. With new prospects, Verkada often sends a trial camera. Despite the cameras being offered for free, many prospects don’t plug them in. For some organizations, getting new devices cleared by IT and connected to the corporate network is understandably a time-consuming process. Often, cameras would sit unconnected while internal funds dried up for the project. All that changed with cellular.
“We started shipping trial cameras with the Hologram-powered cellular gateway, even for non-remote use cases. By making the trial plug and play with little reliance on the customer’s network or IT team, we increased trial plug-in rate significantly, especially for enterprise customers, which is having a significant positive impact on our net new revenue,” added Shen.
With the new gateway in the market and quickly growing, Verkada is looking for ways to leverage other functionality, like the Hologram Dashboard and the APIs. When the SIMs activate in the field, Verkada currently sets up automatic parameters in the Hologram Dashboard for the default carriers they connect to. “Now, we’re looking to use Hologram’s APIs to expose some functionality to empower our customers,” said Shen. “With our new Carrier Switching feature, customers can select what carrier they want based upon their local coverage.”
Thank you Verkada for trusting us to power your mission-critical services. We’re excited to be your connectivity partner as you help create a safer world with your technology.
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Get a free pilot SIM with code FREEPILOTSIM and sign up for the dashboard to get started today.
