With +42% turnover growth this year, the small French company from Orsay pursues its development and ends its financial year 2016 with 1,85 M€ turnover and +538 K€ profit.
Recently installed in its new offices in Palaiseau, EVITECH has left its historical area in Men's friendship district in Antony (photo), where it growed in its infancy. The quick development of building projects around the next "Grand Paris" station led it a few kilometers away, in Palaiseau (TGV and RER station Massy), in new offices, built on demand, with open-space, parkings, terrasse, and caves.
After +30% and +35% growth the two last years, always profitable, Evitech accelerates its growth with +42% in 2016.
"These results are not by hazard," Laurent Assouly declares, smiling, as the young Marketing Director of the company, back from an important meeting in Holland. "They result from a volunteer strategy built on top of three quality targets that we follow carefully and along the long time :
- Quality of our products, first, with intelligent video analytics software at the top of market performance,
- Quality of the customer relationship, and support, to follow a partnership with our customers who want it in the advanced configuration of their systems, for the success and the sake of their projects, and in the maintain of their performance along the time, with maintenance.
- and quality of men and women, and software development, with an expert team, well trained, at the top of image processing and software engineering techniques.".
The company is close to the national French Paris-Saclay cluster, which groups several of the major French scientific centers, and facilitates R&D cooperative projects. Hence, Evitech is partner of INRIA, CNRS, University, and the ENS, within important research projects (ITEA2, ANR, Europe, FUI, ...), with first order industrial companies.
"The company turnover is made of a base of regular projects, on a scale of 1 to 100 cameras, mainly in western Europe" says Laurent, "and some projects, much more important, internationally oriented. When you receive calls of tenders with requirements between 98 and 99 % performances", he pursues, "it is no more time to rely over nice videos, or smart aggressively colored brochures. In the environment of large projects, our customers make heavy investments in their video networks, and want to value them with high end intelligence. These customers want to evaluate deeply products, for weeks, just like in the military world. "
"Developed with regular and rigorous tests (the software is entirely tested automatically every night, with hours of videos corpuses, in order to detect potential regression the same day) our products are at the cutting edge of market performance, just like we demonstrated last month on a nuclear site, and on an industrial site in Lyon."
"The quality of the customer relationship and support are also essential to work in long term partnership," he says. "Hence, it is not enough mentioned that the standard Evitech maintenance contract implies, with the daily support, software updates and new versions, a full hardware renewal every 5 years. Our will is really to guarantee to our customers to stay continuously at the modernity top with the most recent solution over the latest hardware servers."
"The market undergoes very high pressure, it is evolving very quickly," he affirms. "Just look at the map and booth size of recent security events, and the next ones to come : face to a traditional and balanced market of european, american, korean, and japanese providers, the surge of new asiatic players will jostle everything. Several of our competitors who have chosen middle and low market segments, for volumes, are no more exhibitors on events, and are threatened. In the war for lower prices, western countries players cannot win, as this picture says : there will always be someone who says that he can do it cheaper ! This market, initially few segmented, will divide soon in two big segments : the low-cost one, with quick and short distribution circuits, with very few service, simple products, quickly operated with very few questions ; and the professional one, which will address performance, complex requirements, sustainability, cyber-security, quality... A recent cyber-attack against the OVH ISP by a virus installed over a few thousands of Dahua cameras, all with the same login/password, announces the atmosphere of connected objects networks tomorrow", concludes Laurent, who is also graduate of Sup Telecom Paris Tech. "Our customers, the true professionnals, progress quickly, they are now trained for the digital world, for cyber-security, they left the general housing department to join their collegues from IT ; they have the same requirements. An outstanding discount offer for a 16 channels H.264 recorder with video analytics can make impression on the manager of a small shop. It does not make sense by itself for a professional."
D. R.
