AMAG increases ‘activity on the street’

ORLANDO, Fla.—AMAG Technology President David Sullivan says he’s made two key changes since joining the company two years ago: rebuilding the company’s executive management team and raising awareness of its product portfolio. 

Sullivan has added new blood to the team – to the tune of about 60% turnover – including Kyle Gordon, the company’s executive vice president for global sales, marketing and commercial excellence. 

“He came to us from Securitas, and he's really enhanced our activity on the street, so we've got a lot more presence out in front of our customers,” he said during GSX 2024. “That's been a big thing because a lot of our customers have not seen us in a long time, so that was important.”  

Sullivan joined AMAG in 2022 from the ACRE Group, where he previously held the positions of president, ACRE International, and president, ACRE Americas. 

With a solid team behind him, Sullivan has also increased awareness in the market of AMAG’s overall product portfolio and the vertical markets it supports, including utilities, data centers and banks. 

“We've always been thought of as an access control company,” he said. “Yet, over the years, we had acquired some other businesses that brought in visitor management, identity management and a piece of command-and-control software for SOCs (security operations centers), and there wasn't a lot of attention being given to that product portfolio. And even today when we go out and visit some of the customers who are very loyal, they had no idea we had a visitor management solution or even an identity management solution.” 

With leadership from Michael Kobaly, who was promoted to executive vice president, global engineering, AMAG has also accelerated the shift to the cloud for its identity management and visitor management platforms. 

“What we've missed as a product in our product portfolio is a cloud product,” Sullivan said. “(Kobaly) was really the guy that oversaw the development of those products. He thinks and develops native cloud type of applications, so having him at the forefront of our next generation of product is really important. We've been making slow advances toward advancing our existing product, which is strictly on-prem, to more and more cloud-based applications, so eventually we'll have both on-prem and cloud.”  

Also top of mind for Sullivan is the uncertainly surrounding pricing for mobile credentials with Apple Wallet and Google Wallet, an issue he says will continue to be a bone of contention for the immediate future.  

“I think we're all trying to settle on where the pricing of that model is going to be because there were a lot of high aspirations that were going to come out, like $20 per credential per year, and big companies are like, ‘No, that's not going to happen,’” he said. “I think Apple and Google are also trying to figure out where that balance is - how much can we charge versus how much can the channel bear.”