While the company focuses on security specifications, its roots are in the IT side of the business. As such, they know what a good PSIM solution and vendor brings to the table for SDI and its customers.
"PSIM is really quite a comprehensive process of definitions and considers the stakeholders and how they can exploit it as a comprehensive situational management tool," Moscinski said. "Basically it's about working effectively in the command center environment. It takes an end-to-end approach to services and moves all remote end point sensors to the command center environment."
Moscinski said SDI saw the need for PSIM as far back as a decade ago. "The need stems from the delivering of access control, card readers, video, computer-aided dispatch, etc. All of a sudden an operator would have to have four different computers to manage all that information-with different screens and data. We saw a need for a way to simplify that through integration and an opportunity to get all these systems to talk to each other," he said.
According to Moscinski, SDI worked at the Los Angeles International Airport, which illustrated the impact PSIM can have on the protected premises. "The initial project was to build a consolidated command center for siloed groups within the enterprise: security, facility operations, maintenance and others. They didn't say that they needed a PSIM solution of course; but they realized that's what they wanted because they saw how they could apply PSIM and change the paradigm of how they operate. PSIM helped us accelerate the integration of multiple systems. We extended that specification to include specific airport applications, like emergency response and things like work order system management. You can really start to see how the PSIM becomes more situational awareness. The more information we can get coming into one place the more we can correlate it and report on it. At the end of the day, in a command and control center you want to be able to put any incoming operations into automated notification and provide access to the status of all the events," he said.
SDI, which is a certified NICE partner, educates the end user on the concept and the benefits of PSIM. "There are so many subsystems people have to monitor and interact with and the real estate is so crowded. We try to show the customer that they will have more ease of access to information and know what's going on. We educate them on how to consolidate multiple systems; and how, often times, this consolidation enables them to extend the life of a system if it becomes part of this correlated, integrated solution," Moscinski said.
He predicted that in five years PSIM manufacturers will specialize a little deeper than just security, more into the operations aspect of the protected premises. "It's about the concept of operations and how they want work to be defined and define processes. PSIM will try to 'can' a library of processes and procedures to an off-the-shelf solution that for example, might have some standard operating procedures for the transportation market or others."
