Massachusetts-based S2 Security Corporation officially launched its new S2 Global solution on Tuesday, which allows enterprise users of the company’s security and video management systems to integrate them together into one, centrally-controlled network. According to S2 President and CEO John Moss, S2 Global provides the company’s customers with a scalable and cost-effective way to "stich together" these systems.
"What we found was that we had a lot of larger, enterprise-scale customers on the one hand and then we had a number of people who wanted to build service bureaus, if you will, to service access control systems that they might install for others and monitor them on the other hand," explained Moss. "In particular for our enterprise customers - they had assets all over the country and, in some cases, all over the world - they wanted to get a single database basically from corporate to reside in each of these systems. Sometimes they wanted to be able to monitor those systems, sometimes they wanted to be able to manage them when somebody in the field wasn’t there or the site they were managing didn’t have any security personnel at all and what we did was take our existing product set… and built (S2) Global."
Among the benefits of the web-based S2 Global appliance, according to Moss, is the ability to manage access control databases centrally, remotely or a combination of both. Users can also automatically import data from their common personnel management systems.
Other features include:
- Security Operations Center alarm management software to handle multiple simultaneous operators.
- Home page provides immediate access to data at any remote site.
- Report facility integrates activity from remote devices into aggregated reports that can be auto-scheduled.
Moss said that some of the initial customers who have signed up to receive S2 Global come from a variety of vertical markets including the insurance, manufacturing, petrochemical, and biotechnology sectors.
"Basically, it’s a commercial and industrial kind of product, but we’ve had some large schools look at this as well. Anytime you get a customer who has a very large number of remote sites, usually what we discover is that an enterprise is an organization that has a large number of small sites and a small number of large ones," said Moss. "Most of our competitors pay attention to the large sites because that’s where they see the largest checks are written; but the fact is you get, such as an insurance company we’re working with, has hundreds of insurance offices and small sales offices around the country. They want to roll those into a central database for access control and a central database for monitoring."
Though they didn’t conduct formal beta testing on S2 Global, Moss said that the company setup a dozen or so of their existing enterprise customers and let them participate in some of the product design sessions. The first systems for these early adopters will roll out in early August while a mass market launch is slated for September.
"It used to be that only the most zealous companies would ever go after something like this because the costs of tying these systems together were just too high," Moss said. "What’s changed in the last 10 years is the ready availability of Wide Area Networking, not just the Internet, but various high-speed networking pathways that make it super inexpensive to have (integrated security management systems) and corporations today are already networked, so we can very often ride their existing network. Cheap IP networking enables all of this to happen."
