To say that his prior industry experience has prepared Matt Barnette for his new role as President of Mercury Security would be an understatement.
Regarded as one of the most strategic-thinking executives among security vendors, Barnette brings 20-plus years of security manufacturing experience in general and access control solutions in particular to his new job succeeding the retiring Steve Wagner, who spent a decade running the show at Mercury. Barnette moves to Mercury after spending 12 years with AMAG Technology, a leading provider of access control, video management and end-to-end security management solutions, owned by the UK parent company G4S. Barnette held several executive leadership positions during his 12 years at the company, including the last several as President. Barnette helped lead AMAG Technology to double-digit organic growth in North America and oversaw its extensive global rebranding process. Prior to AMAG Technology, he held positions with Andover Controls, Intellikey, and Sensormatic Electronics.
Barnette is excited by the challenges that lie ahead, but his core technology vision is closely related to that of the Mercury team, which has been a beacon of open architecture collaboration and a true spirit of partnership with both vendors and users for decades.
“Mercury is in a unique position in the security industry with a tremendous product portfolio and a reputation for openness, innovation and reliability. It is truly a dream to work for a company that is focused on bringing solutions to market that help companies solve problems and provide great value,” says Barnette, who stepped into the Mercury leadership role this week. “As a technology company, time is always of the essence; there is no time to rest on previous successes. The challenges ahead for Mercury are no different than any other company within our industry. Our main goal is to bring our partners and their customers more value, reduce risks and provide innovative products that address the evolving needs in the market.”
And that fits with his personal business philosophy of selling solutions, not just products. It is that vision which attracted Joe Grillo, CEO of ACRE, the international holding company that acquired Mercury in 2013, to bring Barnette in.
“Matt's deep industry expertise, leadership, and vision are perfectly matched to drive the shared mission and success of Mercury Security and its valued partners,” says Grillo. “As an industry veteran known for his successful track record and customer-centric approach, I am confident that Matt has the proven ability to build upon the strategic support delivered to Mercury partners and capture the increasing market demand for open and interoperable access control solutions with Authentic Mercury hardware.”
It is a challenge Barnette feels he has trained for his entire career and one he looks forward to. Mercury has some of the most ubiquitous access control hardware in the security industry and has been a proponent of open systems for more than 20 years with its panels and controllers. But Mercury’s commitment to technology advancement is truly found in its ability to grow its strategic vendor partnerships and is reflected in its ecosystem of information sharing.
So how does Barnette plan to continue this short-term growth and long-term expansion?
“That’s a great question because the key to our success is through our partners and their customers. We need to enable them to sustain what they have in place today by providing open products that don’t require them to spend valuable time and capital on upgrades. At the same time, we need to develop new products that help solve more complex issues customers are facing,” Barnette admits. “One of the focus areas for Mercury is to continue our evolution from providing intelligent IP controllers to enhancing their capability to be an intelligent data exchange appliances. Meaning, the panel is capable of interfacing to many more buildings and IT sub-systems, directly, and becomes the hub of this data exchange.
“For example, we currently have the ability to provide a BacNET gateway on a Mercury panel. This functionality is used to integrate to any Building Management System (BMS) that supports the BacNET open protocol so we can send and receive data seamlessly from those systems. In addition, we will be releasing an interface to Elevator Destination Dispatch systems, which is another intelligent integration option. The library of partner integrations that will reside natively on our panels will build over time, thus allowing our OEM partners to quickly and easily bring solutions to market through our standardize robust API they already support.”
Building upon Mercury’s success of open architecture solutions for the systems integrators -- that ultimately benefit end-user clients -- is a high priority on the company’s security technology roadmap. Barnette wants to create more value for the vendor partners which will, in turn, help them push cost-effective solutions to the entire customer base.
“Mercury has really set the standard for open architecture in the access control industry and we will continue to drive that message to market by creating products that are powerful, cost-effective, scalable and open. I believe there is more we can do to help create value for our partners by integrating to more third-party proprietary platforms, therefore providing more options to our OEM partners and ultimately end-user customers,” adds Barnette. “By offering a more efficient and scalable platform that does not require additional time, capital and resources, we’ve in essence created an open gateway.
“Mercury has done this repeatedly by providing hardware and sophisticated firmware with an open API, while also being an active contributor to driving the adoption of open standards in the industry through our work with SIA and our support of BacNET, PSIA, and many other standards, to meet that objective. Our current generation of products will continue to evolve to allow more and more openness through integrations because of the processing power and memory already resident onboard.”
About the Author:
Steve Lasky is a 30-year veteran of the security media industry. He is currently the editorial director of SouthComm Security Media Group and conference director of Secured Cities. He can be reached at [email protected].
