Issue link: https://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/919877
20 FEDA News & Views A new crop of entrants selling lower- priced LED options has been equally troublesome and forced some lighting distributors to strip costs and elimi- nate in-house lighting expertise, he says. Albeit, they're small potatoes next to heavyweights like Cisco. With the Internet of Things (IoT) paving the way, the tech company and its peers have been quick to take advantage of the opportunities associated with the big shift to LED. One of Cisco's creations, the Digital Ceiling, is a smart solution that inte- grates multiple systems (i.e., security, HVAC, building controls) under one roof in a single converged IP network. Here's the significance to the lighting industry: "As organizations go through the process of switching to networked LED systems, the new smart light- ing solution will act as the aggrega- tion point for all these other building networks," explained analyst Zeus Kerravala in Network World. "The light- ing network is the fastest way of creat- ing a Digital Ceiling, since lights are pervasive and spaced within eight feet of each other, making it the only viable system to act as a central connection point." The possibilities have attracted even more attention from tech com- panies looking to capitalize. "Now we're in the second wave of disrup- tion," says Brown. "Companies like Cisco, Qualcomm, Intel, Google, Apple, Amazon and Verizon are all in the lighting business—not because they want to be in the lighting business, but because it's the easiest path to the data acquisition and analytics they hope to provide." Opportunity for Whom? After introducing Illumigeddon into his industry's lexicon, Brown inserted another, Illumitunity. "I had a lot of fun coming up with that," he laughs. The reverse in course came after Cisco unveiled its Digital Ceiling and announced its alliances with a growing number of traditional lighting manu- facturers. "There's enormous potential in the Internet of Things and the integra- tion of smart lighting products, but for whom?" Brown wrote in a commentary for the website Electrical Wholesaling. "Traditional electrical distributors and lighting distributors will need new levels of high technical competencies and new services/solutions to elbow their way to the table. And who will they be competing against, in addi- tion to traditional competitors? Do the new technology players in our busi- ness respect our 100-year-old business model? Should they? Are we as efficient as their distribution models?" Those were the kind of questions Brown was always asking when he was president of Wiedenbach-Brown. "Our traditional model is a little different than E&S," he says. "There are a lot of players—the architect, manufacturer, manufacturer's rep, the distributor, the electrical contractor, the chief engi- neer, the inspector. After the products were installed, it was always consid- ered by most of us to be an inefficient model with a lot of people sticking their hands in there to grab a piece of the pie. The new players entering our industry had their own ways of doing business and that caused disruption. "My response to the disruption was to look at the big picture, freeing me up to focus on the distant thunder." The distant thunder is what he often refers to as the future trends or cues that signal impending change. Brown was listening when the creator of Netscape, Marc Andreessen, predicted that e-commerce stores would lead to the withering away of the traditional retail store and its eventual death. "Of course, he should have modified his statement," says Wiedenbach-Brown's CEO. "E-commerce will not lead to the absolute death, but I'll give him credit for grabbing the headlines." Even so, Andreessen's presumptuous- ness struck a chord. "At the time, 60 to 70 percent of our business was in national retail accounts, so I informed our salespeople that we had two threats looming in the distance," says Brown. "One was the Internet's impact on retail sales. The other was how LEDs were going to threaten our replacement lightbulb business. Well, both of those things are happening now and even though we couldn't control either one, my job was to come up with a way to supplement the business we were going to lose in the future." What You're Really Selling One of Wiedenbach-Brown's strate- gies for responding to the thunder was to redefine its value proposition and offer customers more in the line LOOKING AT THE BIG PICTURE DISRUPT OR BE DISRUPTED Sanjay Kaul, Managing Director, Service Provider Business, Cisco India It's not just business models that are changing, value chains and product offerings are undergoing change as well. Digitization is changing industries and increasingly blurring the lines between them. Changes start with companies being more agile, more willing to partner, and build systems and processes to accommodate that change. Combining value-cost, experience, and platform-to create disruptive new business models will bring exponential gains. As businesses stand in the midst of digital disruption, getting success will depend on three pillars, fi rst getting market transitions right, and obviously, digitization and the Internet of everything are at the front of that. The second is not doing the same thing for too long. Companies have to move into market adjacencies and bring what is learned back into their core capability. The third and the most diffi cult one, perhaps, is for leaders to reinvent themselves – as a CIO, as a CEO and the company as a whole.