Nebula’s Richard Eglon talks Verkada deal and emerging vendor rise

Eglon speaks to CRN about why Nebula’s strategy revolves around emerging vendors and why as-a-service is out and outcome-as-a-service is in

Nebula Global Services is focusing on emerging vendors as a pillar of its business strategy and plugging a services gap.

Last month Nebula announced a shiny new vendor partnership with cloud-based physical security platform company Verkada.

The deal saw Nebula earn Global Premier Services Partner status with Verkada, landing it on the vendor’s partner locator.

Richard Eglon, CMO at Nebula tells CRN the company is already reaping the rewards of the move.

“Since being added, we’ve had so many leads come in just off the back of being on Verkada’s partner locator, which is great for Nebula, but more importantly, it's great for those channel partners that are trying to provision a service off the back of their product set.”

Eglon explains that the physical security industry where Verkada plays has seen “exponential growth” over the last few years.

The space is also innovating rapidly, releasing new offerings into its product mix such as vape sensors in colleges to combat the rising issue in education facilities.

“With social changes like this, including more people moving back to cities to follow work, drives more of this physical security demand,” says Eglon.

However, with the boom in this market, the Nebula CMO says he’s noticed a “disconnect” with the services offering.

“The product is flying, but the people who install, service and maintain this type of product have been very localised companies, such as electricians, for example.

“An IT services governance and framework hasn't been wrapped around it in the past. What that means is the services play of this product has been subscale historically.

“So as fast as the product is going off the shelves, the actual ability to service and deploy and do the service to make sure you're efficiently buying the right product and locating it in the right location hasn’t really been there.”

Nebula’s strategy

This is where Nebula comes into play, attaching its outcome-focused services offering to Verkada’s product range for the vendor’s reseller community, positioning them as key partners to their end clients.

Emerging vendors like Verkada are integral to Nebula’s game plan, Eglon explains.

“Nebula’s strategy centres on an alignment with emerging vendors where we become part of their go-to-market with their distributors who are selling the product.

“A lot of emerging vendors, unlike the incumbent vendors, don't want to build their own services portfolio.

“But they need partners. So, companies like Nebula, we’re more of a services distributor rather than a product distributor. And the two go hand in hand.”

As-a-service on the out?

A growing number of global businesses have been adopting an as-a-service business model the last few years in favour of its subscription-based nature.

However, Eglon believes we’re on the brink of a new as-a-service age.

“We’ve come from an as-a-service era. But what we find ourselves in now is a reliance more on the outcome, as-an-outcome,” he says.

“This is a step on from a solution because an outcome has to be more agile and adaptive.

“We’re going to see more of this outcome-as-a-service model.

“It relies on a strong value chain. So, you need to have implemented those strong relationships with complementary partners, but it's got to be delivered through a single point of contact.”

More importantly, he adds, these emerging vendors are going to start taking more of the spotlight.

“I think we're going to see a lot more of these emerging vendors coming to the fore, because they’re much more agile than some of the incumbents out there and so and off the back of that, we'll probably see a number of acquisitions by the bigger incumbents of these emerging vendors.”