The first day of the annual CSAA Electronic Security Forum & Expo (held last week, May 19-22, 2006) proved to be a veritable who’s who of the security industry. Just to name a few of the faces at this years riverside event in the glorious southern city of Savannah, GA are: Richard Chase of SIA; Keith Jentoft of RSI Alarm; Bill Bozeman of PSA; Shamus Hurley, president N.A. of Bosch; Ron Rothman, president of Honeywell Security; Stanley Oppenheim, president of DGA Security; Pat Devereau of Emergency 24; Steve Rubin of SAI; Joe Sausa, president of First Alert; Bart Didden, president of USA Central Station; Bud Wulforst of A-1 Security; Bob Bonifas of Alarm Detection Systems; Ivan Spector of Sentinel Alarm; Ralph Sevinor of Wayne Alarm; Dick Sampson of American Alarm; Peter and Andy Lowitt of Metrodial; Avi Lupo of OzVision, and last but certainly not least, Charlie Darsch, this years Triton Award Winner. Security Dealer and SecurityInfoWatch.com extend a big congrat out to Charlie.
The expo and CSAA meetings continued seemingly around the clock, and a mid-sized exhibit floor pointed the mix of dealers and central station companies at a variety of new products. For the last couple years, we've been seeing a steady growth in the number of non-traditional residential and small-business monitoring products. By non-traditional, I mean that we're not just seeing PIRs and door/window-position sensors. The wave of today that we saw back at ISC West and that was also here at the CSAA Expo was a variety of cameras and even audio monitoring tools. On that front, there were technologies like those from RSI Alarm, which was showcasing a small PIR tied in with a camera, so that the unified sensor/camera shoots video to the central station only when the PIR is detection. Audio verification also seemed to be picking up some speed. It's been well-used by Sonitrol in the past, but other companies, like Security Central are adopting this monitoring tool.
Other hot topics were the coming AMPS expiration, verification ordinances, and new standards for delivering data back and forth between police call stations and central stations.
Look for more of these topics to be addressed in upcoming issues of Security Dealer and on the web at SecurityInfoWatch.com.
