A Cloud Business likely no one would think about

Cloud business nowadays is one of the hottest areas with a tremendous growth potential. But what companies you will think about when we talk about clouding? Likely Amazon or Microsoft like high tech companies in your mind. You may not believe what I’m going to tell you below.

I guess many of you have heard about stun guns,  those electrical weapons that won’t kill you but will paralyze you with electric shock waves. The manufacturer of the stun guns is Taser Intl (TASR). While TASR is most famous for such stun guns, it has gone much beyond the weapon business. Actually it will boom much more from its cloud-based business that no one is talking about.  Let me explain.

You probably have heard more and more tragic stories that involve police-related deaths. Police was accused of overusing power that caused accidental deaths of suspects. As such, it becomes a very real need for police to wear body cameras that will record all the details of policemen’s actions during their law enforcement work. Such body cameras will actually benefit both sides: for police they can prove what they are doing is appropriate and for suspects, they have less fear to be beaten or killed in front of a camera. TASR has seen this lucrative business and is offering two versions of its body cams: the standard Axon Body and the Axon Flex. Needless to say, the cams business is booming due to the increasing demand, not only in the US but likely also internationally. But TASR does not stop there. This is really the clever part of the TASR management. As we have seen many examples (e.g. Apple’s iPhone), regardless how high a demand is, there is a limit and it will go down over time as the market need is saturated with the supply. To overcome this problem, TASR has set up a cloud-based database called Evidence.com, which can upload, store all the evidence videos recorded by policemen.  They often bundle its body cameras with a subscription to Evidence.com that makes the life of police department a lot easier to store and manage such videos as potential evidence when needed. Think about it,  as long as policy will use their body cameras, the need for this cloud-base database will not go down.  This is really a great business model that will benefit TASR for years to come. In fact, such a database, when capturing more and more data after years of operation, will become unreplaceable as no one can replicate the historic data if not initially captured. I think TASR’s Evidence database will likely also become a valuable source for future uses beyond simply providing some evidence for police.

This is an out of norm cloud business that not many people are thinking about it but I see a great potential for TASR in the foreseeable future!