As a professional integrator of over 15 years’ experience, I have learned to find the right products for my business model, how to get the best out of them and to stick to that formula.

Every product change comes with some pain and as a small business we tend to support one product manufacturer for a genre, for example Clipsal CBus for lighting, Ness M1 for security and access control. We have been using RTI for control systems for about 10 years as they have a scalable solution covering hardware and software and have experienced almost no failures with the product, meaning we have a solid delivery of performance and the price is competitive – what’s not to like about that in business?

Recently, Clipsal, who in 2014 bought Push Controls, had mandated that to keep Clipsal CBus accreditation we would have to attend the training for Push Controls. Now, usually I am not one to be pushed into any new products when I have had such a good run from my existing supplier, but this is one of those cases where it had to be done. The wash up of the training is that the Push product is very close to delivering all that I get from RTI in our standard projects and perhaps a little cheaper. With the marketing behind Push, I expect that we will soon start to see new clients come to us already expecting to be sold the Push solution. So this makes for a unique variation to my long standing advice where we will support two products for a genre.

Maybe just sometimes you need to jump before you are pushed in a new direction.

Cheers, Ian