AeroScout Sees Exploding Health Care Channel

Company:

Headquarters: Redwood City, Calif.

Technology Sector: Networking

Key Product: AeroScout Asset Tracking and Management

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: 90 worldwide

Ideal Channel Partner: Enterprise-focused solution providers

Why You Should Care: AeroScout is seeing explosive channel growth in a number of vertical markets, especially healthcare, its largest.

The Lowdown: AeroScout was born in 2004, five years after it was originally founded as Bluesoft. In that time it has developed as a specialist in real-time locating systems (RTLS), products that allow users to track and monitor assets and people while leveraging existing Wi-Fi networks. The company's products are found in more than 500 organizations worldwide in everything from manufacturing to logistics, but health care makes up the largest percentage.

According to AeroScout, the company experienced 150-percent revenue growth in its health care segment in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the year-ago quarter and added 30 new hospital clients in its most recent quarter of 2009. Research firm KLAS Enterprises in January ranked AeroScout as the No. 1 RTLS vendor by market share in the health care space.

The continued health care spike has meant big returns for AeroScout's 90-odd channel partners (about half of them in the United States). AeroScout's business is about 85 percent indirect overall, according to the company, and it continues to recruit new partners.

"Health care is a much more mature channel for us simply because we know the solution, and despite differences in hospitals, they're also very much alike, with applications that are similar," said Chuck Pledger, vice president of global channel sales. "It's easier for us to train how to sell into health care, so there we tend to be a lot higher than 85 percent [indirect]."

Pledger sees opportunities across the board for everyone from industry solution resellers like Philips and Siemens, to systems integrators, to the VAR sales channels of networking giants like Cisco (one of many vendors with whom AeroScout partners).

Some of the best opportunities in health care are for regional VARs expanding their health care practices as the vertical stays strong -- and growing -- during a weak economy, he said. And while most of AeroScout's health care clientele is comprised of enteprise-level hospitals and hospital systems, it's also burrowed into niche health care markets such as long-term care that rely on condition monitoring (RFID tags and software for temperature and humidity), patient and staff safety monitoring and other products.

"I see a lot of regional guys flocking to health care thinking 'save me,'" Pledger said of VARs. "But the struggle I see is that a lot of these guys just don't understand the market. They're too focused on flocking to healthcare and saying 'that'll be our survival.' In a hospital environment, your sale is anecdotes. You learn this stuff from the compliance officers and nursing officers and everybody in the health care environment, and you hear about the procedures and the workflow and the day-to-day. You need to have some of that background and some of those stories. We can help you with that."