Zicom bets big on IoT, eyes revenue of Rs 200 cr by 2020

"Zicom has moved from being a pure play, physical security company into an IoT and SaaS IT Services business model. With the exponential internet penetration growing in the country, Zicom is all set to take full advantage to become the market leader within the Internet of Things (IoT) and SaaS place," Zicom Electronic Security Systems' managing director Pramoud Rao told PTI here.

"We have notched up a revenue of around Rs 50 crore in fiscal 2017 and expect to reach service revenue of Rs 175 crore to Rs 200 crore by 2020," he said.

"We are now looking at new avenues to grow the business by adopting newer technologies, like artificial intelligence. We are also investing in deep learning in the domain of access control as well as towards introducing voice-based security services under the Amazon, Alexa platform," Rao said.

The IoT market continues to see strong growth. The worldwide IoT market spend will grow from USD 625.2 billion in 2015 to USD 1.29 trillion in 2020, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.6 per cent, he said.

The installed base of IoT end points will grow from USD 12.1 billion at the end of 2015 to more than USD 30 billion by 2020. The Indian security industry is in a state of big transition due to SaaS, IoT, smart city and safe city trends, he further said.

In 2013, the company identified the potential of IoT business and started taking steps towards gaining leadership in the IoT space. It has set up the country's largest command and control centre with service network in over 1,100 cities.

The approach was to provide business intelligence together using safety and security, club it with loss prevention features combined with comfort and convenience, offering information on the mobile devises, Rao said.

The Indian security market in 2017, according to Gartner, is growing at the rate of 10.6 per cent, from USD 1.24 billion and the number of connected devices in India is estimated to be around USD 200 million. This is expected to increase USD 3 billion in 2020.

Hence, it augurs well for the security market in India and players like Zicom will have major role to play in the coming years, he said.

Since the business model offers considerable cost reduction, without the customer having to invest or manage the equipment, Zicom's pioneering concept met up with huge success since the USP offered by the company was a huge paradigm shift within the security industry, namely CCTVs systems always recorded a crime, Zicom prevented the crime, from reactive to being proactive, Rao said.

In the case of ATM e-surveillance, the cost of managing an ATM was averaging between Rs 30,000 to Rs 40,000 for the bank. By using the e-surveillance technology, the cost was reduced to a mere Rs 4,000. This saved the bank almost 90 per cent on the safety and security cost, he added.