4 Leaders Ride the Security Integration Wave
Four security integrators explain why the industry needs to pool its resources and send out an SOS to get more able-bodied hands on deck and more.
(l-r) Integrator executives Bert Bongard, Daniel Prochnow, Charles Baker and Barton Kartoz spout off about opportunities, obstacles and operations.
KARTOZ: What’s the typical profile of the client that quickly understands the value and is interested in cloud-based video, and what do you do with customers if they just can’t get interested?
BAKER: We’ve identified a couple of profiles. One, if you’re dealing with the IT department, and it’s an IT department that’s really focused on their business and the growth of their business, the last thing they want is yet another server with a specific application to worry about. They’re happy with outsourcing that overhead to someone who’s an expert, who has subject expertise. The flipside to that is the IT guy who’s keeping his arms around everything; the phone system, E-mail, every single thing, and that’s not a great candidate. It’s very difficult to convince those guys that hosted is a good solution.
The other great candidates in the commercial market space are property management firms. They don’t have the subject expertise to really know how to work with access control efficiently. The last thing they want and they have now are servers in a whole bunch of buildings sitting there with their engineers logging in to add cards. To provide them with a single interface where they can log into individual buildings to unlock doors for vendors, unlock doors for CEOs who maybe showed up on a weekend and forgot their card, or their card isn’t working. Instead of having to take your kid away from the soccer game, he or she can simply use the mobile application, verify who it is, unlock the door remotely, and look like a hero.
BERT BONGARD: We do a fair amount of work in the forensic nursing world with state hospitals, where we are doing a lot of analytics, perimeter control, asset tracking, things of that nature for those clients. We’re really gaining some momentum in that realm.
With integration in general, we’ve partnered up with another company that lives in the HVAC world, where we have a platform on the Niagara Fram
ework to pull all the things into integration for the smart building concept. We’ve called it HALO, which combines our partner Harris Mechanical and our Low Voltage Contractors name. It’s something we’re pushing to the building owners, big tenants, property managers, high rises, etc.
We’re also in the situational awareness market. Again, integration; pulling in all those resources to help stay off potential threats, get the word out faster so the police or fire or whoever can get to the site more quickly to save assets.
Wearable cameras are a hot topic now. Dan, where do you see that going? Do you talk about it?
PROCHNOW: Our company is just outside Baltimore, so we’ve been going through issues because of the individual who died after a police incident. If there had been video to see exactly what had happened, probably swifter action could have been taken against the officers if that was appropriate, or not taken. People could see with their own eyeballs whether or not the officers acted in the right or wrong manner.
The challenge we see with wearable cameras is that a lot of it is self-contained storage on the body, but eventually what you would want is to be able to record and get it out via wireless or some service, and be able to store that, and collect it off the person. How do you do that? The storage systems are going to be so vital; they’ll have to be robust, redundant and secure. Imagine all these officers wearing cameras. You’re talking a lot of video. All this information will have to be so carefully managed; as you can imagine with a police officer and an incident, if that video got lost or corrupted it would really cause a lot of issues and problems. There’s going to be a big play in the storage area.
BAKER: The politicians and the press like to talk about, “All we’ve got to do is get a camera on them.” That’s the least expensive and easiest part. The hard part is the backend to manage, archive and be able to search a first responder who may face an accusation on Friday about something that happened on Tuesday. How does he defend himself, how does the department defend themselves? It’s that backend that’s going to be the most expensive and an ongoing expense.
KARTOZ: There’s a lot to be worked out on the legal and HR frameworks for the use of video and those kinds of environments. I think you see a lot of police departments now doing pilots, but it remains to be seen whether police departments will deploy this on a wide basis. The objective is to make sure law enforcement organizations have a high level of good behavior and it’s obvious that in some cases there hasn’t been. And I’m sure there’s lots of cases we don’t know about.
The bottom line is that the threat of these kinds of systems being available is going to be one piece of the larger framework for getting law enforcement and other authoritative organizations to really consider their role in the world. I think it’s a healthy thing, but I doubt we’re going to see video deployed on every law enforcement officer.
BAKER: A sort of a parallel is from the VMS manufacturers now offering push technology. We’re deploying that and it’s really popular among our clients. In essence your phone is now a camera on your video system. When a guard or facilities person sees a problem, they push play or record and it streams immediately to, in our case, a Milestone system. It is archived, searchable, and has a time and date stamp. It’s an interesting way of using mobile video, which is what we’re talking about with the police, in a way that’s practical in the commercial world.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine
Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at sgoldfine@eliteisi.com.
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