Q&A on Digital Mortar and PMY

Becoming part of PMY is a big deal for us. Obviously. It’s a huge business opportunity and a very big change personally. But the truth is that for most of our clients and partners it will be business as usual - though I hope it will be a little better than usual. This has been in the works since late summer, and I've spent a lot of time recently giving a heads-up to our partners and clients (and friends). That means I’ve already gotten reactions from a bunch of folks we work with and in this post, I’m just going to go through and bang out the answers (at least the ones I have right now) to the most common questions!

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Will you continue to support existing clients?

Yes. Completely. When I said nothing much was going to change, I really mean it. We’ll still be leading engagements with our clients. We’ll still be supporting them. None of the licensing terms or prices will change. Not now and not at renewal. Will things change in the long run? Probably. They always do. But right now, our plans are focused on the next big product rev and the new capabilities we can bring to the table.

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What about verticals that PMY isn’t heavy engaged with like retail?

One of the things that PMY made really clear is that they want us to keep and grow our clients and, particularly in the U.S., continue to support retail, transit, and airport verticals. I like that because I like our clients and because there is a lot of interesting work going on. That being said, we’ve done only a smattering of work pre-PMY in the sports and event verticals, and there’s no doubt that we’re going to be adding a lot of capabilities to the product that are focused on supporting live events and arenas. That includes CCTV crowd-sizing, more real-time capabilities, and integrations around event meta-data, ticketing, merch and F&B.

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Is the product going to change?

I could almost echo the answer above here. We’re going to continue to build and improve the platform. In the short run, as we work toward a major release, I anticipate slower and fewer release cycles than have been our norm, but I think the next version will add a bunch of significant new capabilities. That will likely include a UI re-design that we’ve been hankering to do for quite a while, greatly improved real-time capabilities (which was already a big focus for us this year), and greatly expanded capabilities around meta-data and time-based reporting.

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What about the Digital Mortar Brand?

It’s going to go away though that may take a few more months. When EY bought Semphonic, we made the same decision. PMY has made quite a few acquisitions, and those companies have chosen a number of different integration strategies from staying largely independent to branding as part of the group to just integrating into the brand. Some of those companies are a lot bigger and more deeply branded than Digital Mortar ever was, and some aren’t trying to grow in Sports/Events. Not only am I a firm believer in brand integration (I think it’s cleaner and psychologically better), the main point of this is to open up the deep relationships that PMY has in their core vertical where we have essentially zero brand awareness. So, it would be pretty stupid to not just be the brand.

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Are you going to stick around?

I’ll be honest, I thought long and hard about this. The PMY guys are great. They’ve built an impressive company that is growing like crazy and is, from my perspective, sized perfectly and in an ideal marketplace. PMY is still an aggressive growth company without all the trappings of a global behemoth like EY. That makes it an easier cultural fit, and the founders and executive team are all heavily engaged, hands-on, and bring the kind of decisive action and risk tolerance that I frankly crave. On the other hand, they are a lot younger than I am and are fifteen years into what is probably a twenty-five-year journey. I can’t see myself working another ten years, and I haven’t really needed to work since the Semphonic acquisition. So yeah – I thought pretty hard about what I wanted to do.

In the end, it came down to a pretty simple fact: I’m still enjoying this work. As long as that stays true, I can’t think why I shouldn’t keep doing it. I’ve been through the mill on acquisitions before and I know this might look different next year or the year after. In fact, given my age, I expect it to look different at some point in the next couple of years. The only real question is when that point has arrived, and I don’t plan to go all Joe Biden with my fingernails gouging the doorframe as I’m dragged out.

I am going to try and focus on a more strategic set of problems at PMY. While I’ll still be working on people-measurement, flow analytics, and our platform, I’m also hoping to work on some of the other aspects of PMY’s business and influence the broader strategic direction. As I mentioned briefly in my overview post, that includes work on athlete performance analytics and drone security. Both have close ties to flow analytics but are distinct business opportunities.

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What about the rest of the team?

Everyone came over and mostly in the same roles they’ve always had. Jesse Gross has in many respects become the “key man” in Digital Mortar and he’ll continue to be the Product Manager for the platform in PMY as well as supporting clients in the U.S. Region.? Jonathan Berne, who has become the de facto chief builder/leader of that platform will continue leading our engineering team with some expanded global resources beyond our core team.

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Will this change the technologies you use or your approach to people-measurement?

Not so much. We’ve got some great sensor partners (lidar and camera) and I’m glad that PMY is new to what we do and hasn’t built up a bunch of sensor or brand commitments that would change any of that. I continue to believe that there is no one right sensor for every use-case and environment. I also think that our partners are delivering some pretty compelling technology. The one piece of technology that PMY does bring to the table isn’t a sensor – it’s a video ML solution that does bulk crowd counting. That’s a very different capability than anything we’ve ever built or tried to build and while it doesn’t remotely do what we do, it does handle one kind of problem that has always defeated us in the past. What’s more, that team is continuing to build out their capabilities and I can see us starting to leverage and integrate more and more existing camera infrastructure into our deployments for tasks like re-identification and demographic meta-data.

One aspect of PMY harkens back to my Semphonic and EY days. PMY does a lot of hands-on data analytics and consulting. We shunned that at Digital Mortar trying to keep our focus resolutely on product. Both Jesse and I came to feel that we probably overdid that. In something as new as people-measurement remains for most people in most verticals, some consulting support can go a long way toward speeding product adoption and improving customer success. We expect to do more of that at PMY – partly because we’ve come think we should and partly because PMY has a bunch of people who can do it and do it well.