In Donald Lee Sheppard’s recent book, Dividends of Decency: How Values-Based Leadership will Help Business Flourish, the author muses about how a company’s ethics, decency, and trust by its leaders effect the success of the company and the impact it has in our overall society. Within our own physical security industry, there is a company —and its founder— that also abides by what too many may consider “old fashion” business tactics.

Ethics, trust, and confidence are not just words painted on a poster and hung in the corporate lobby for visitors to read at BCDVideo. Founder Jeff Burgess is passionate about “doing right by the customer.” And if you sit with Burgess long enough, as I was fortunate to have done at this past ISC West show in Las Vegas, you will come to realize that this is real for him.

Burgess started the precursor of BCDVideo, in 2002, at an intersection of I.T. and video surveillance. Burgess was an IT server integrator delivering high-availability servers to a GE Capital Services Company -GE Security- that would introduce Burgess to Tom Larson, arguably one of the most technically astute individuals in the physical security industry. The combination of Larson’s technical chops and Burgess’ family-oriented business ethics has built a dominate provider of servers and storage solutions for video surveillance installations.

BCDVideo has been building servers for the likes of some of the biggest names in the security industry – Video Management Software companies, camera manufacturers, and integrators of all sizes; roughly 30 in all. A significant reason these brands are coming to BCDVideo is due to the technical knowledge, experience, and know-how on building the “correctly specified” servers and storage solutions. Not too big. Not too small. Just right solutions. And BCDVideo has been hanging their hat on that kind of perfection.

Tested, vetted, and validated to deliver the right solution while not over building it. BCDVideo calls it their ‘risk insurance‘ with the BCDVideo Guarantee that the solution is correctly built for the requirement at hand. Burgess explains, “that if there is an issue, we will make it right. If the hard drives are not the right capacity, we will swap them out.” And Burgess highlights that for the A&Es (architects and engineers) in the industry, teaming with BCDVideo will give them the peace of mind that the solution is indeed correctly spec’d.

It’s easier to do when you’re just getting the company started and you have three or four employees. BCDVideo now employs over 70 people and the honest-to-goodness “family”-style run business still executes with the belief that taking care of the customer is not just something a book says is the right way to do business. Burgess’ BCDVideo has his customer-centric DNA throughout the organization.

And Burgess is convinced that it is the primary reason for the success and growth of the company is this philosophy.

“Our partners are solidly behind BCDVideo and are very supportive of the path we are on,” Burgess explained and smiled as he started talking about the new partnership with Dell wherein BCDVideo will be utilizing DELL servers and system in new BCDVideo offerings, while maintaining their long-term relationship and product offerings with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. “Dell has allowed me -and the really the whole BCDVideo team- to go back to high school and do now what we wish we knew then.”

Burgess went on to explain that old adage about growing wiser in life and how “DELL has reinvigorated BCDVideo’s creative juices to build the right solutions for our customers.” In many cases, Burgess glowed, it could take up to 35 days to get a DELL order, “but at BCDVideo, we will be able to ship DELL-based solutions in just 3-days.”

We were also able to catch up at the ISC expo with a BCDVIdeo reseller, MSE, and their Director of Systems Engineering, Andrew Cianciosi. Cianciosi has been with MSE, a reseller focused on corporate physical security needs, for just over 3 1/2-years. MSE was founded in 1993 and acquired by ADT in September of 2017. Cianciosi sat down with us to discuss why they partner with BCDVideo.

“It’s all about bandwidth,” Cianciosi explained. If their suppliers can handle so much of the upfront issues, that frees up more of his engineer’s time to do the more important tasks. “There really isn’t anything ‘soft’ about those ‘soft dollar’ costs that can really eat into any profitability of a project.”

“We had used another custom server builder providing systems to MSE but it wasn’t long before we realized that the other builder didn’t have the integral knowledge or security specific experience that we really needed. They under-estimated what MSE did and they really under-estimated why MSE did the things we did,” shared Cianciosi. The lack of attention to detail cost Cianciosi way too many soft dollars.

“When I can have my engineers working on pre-sale customer implementation work over a post-sale support issue, then that leads straight to the bottom line,” Cianciosi explained. “We have this big trust and confidence factor with BCDVideo and I can give you a specific story on how we got here with BCDVideo.”

“We have a customer that is a major telecom company that was having a data enter security issues. We had to send a MSE tech onsite and we needed a 40TB server shipped overnight to be there for our tech. BCDVideo moved heaven and earth and got the correct server onsite overnight,” detailed Cianciosi.

This kind of expertise, knowledge, and real relationship is so hard to come by. Mistakes happen. BCDVideo isn’t perfect and a recent issue came up that Burgess told Cianciosi he would pay to fix it. “No,” said Cianciosi “I’ll pay for this one, but when ‘we’ mess up, I’ll want that help then.” That’s a sign of a solid partnership.

MSE’s Cianciosi said that “trust in the product and the confidence to deliver it is the key to what BCDVideo is all about.”

Burgess quickly added, “we don’t say ‘no,’ we say ‘what can we do?'”

As I write this company story, I’m concerned about writing such a piece that puts a company or a person on such a lofty plateau. It would be easy for a reader to challenge such praise, do business with the company, and have a crappy experience. Then think about this story as some kind of PR puff piece. I’m personally confident that Burgess just can’t let it happen. It’s personal to him. It’s part of his DNA. Decency does have dividends and BCDVideo and Burgess are the ones paying it to their customers.

Source: bcdvideo.com