On Tuesday, Sept. 26, I pulled on the walking shoes to see what the jewels were at ASIS 2006. These are among the top technologies that grabbed my attention:
When I first met Steve Russell, the CEO of 3VR two years ago, the company was in the midst of developing a product that they could take to market. Armed with the idea of improving the search functionality of recorded video information, the company has created a DVR and/or software system that enables search functions which don't require you to brew a pot of coffee while you're waiting on the results. I'm no pro at being able to explain 3VR's technology, but I think the best way to put it is that it creates a Google-like index of video being recorded. According to Russell, the searchable video platform works great for a number of markets, but the company is seeing a strong interest from banks as the product comes to its hard launch in its newest version.
Ioimage is another technology that's appeared in the U.S. market direct from Israel. According to Dvir Doron, ioimage's V.P. of marketing, the technology came about as the result of the challenge to prove video analytics for use along the Israel-Palestinian Authority border. Doron explained that the company was challenged with the prospect of proving its technology against such difficult problems as crawling attackers who move slow and low to the ground, or for dealing with threat identification and person tracking in visually difficult border locations. Needless to say, the technology passed the IDF’s rigorous test. To take the new technology beyond unique defense applications, ioimage took those algorithms and made sure the analytics could be integrated fully within encoders and a new IP camera. On top of that, the company sought to ease the difficulty of installing analytics, and delivered the technology in such a way that dealers and integrators could, upon plugging the units in, have analytics operation within 5 minutes. Self-learning algorithms are added to continually improve the units.
I wrote yesterday about Lenel's IdentityDefender FIPS 201 enrollment solution, and yet I'd be remiss if I didn't mention two more systems from vendors that understand this process. Over at Hirsch Electronics booth, Lars Suneborn (director, government affairs) and Scott Howell (director, marketing) can be found demonstrating the company's end-to-end FIPS 201 solution for the enrollment, card issuance and final authentication process. It’s a seamless package that really helps take the mystery out of this government requirement. ADT is also on board with a similar system for personnel enrollment, vetting, card printing and authentication. These three companies - Hirsch, Lenel and ADT - seem to actually understand that the first, biggest problem is enrollment, and that the biggest challenge government security pros are facing is not deploying new technology, but adhering to strict employee processing standards. If you need to implement this process at your agency, you'd be well advised to meet with all three to compare their solutions to your needs.
Brivo's access control platforms have always managed to introduce unique features. One of the things that really caught my eye from the ACS line (both the OnSite product and the web-hosted platform) was that the access system is immediately applicable for a multi-office environment, enabling a landlord or parent company to manage facility access control as a whole, but also to create different rules, groups and zones so that an individual property's access control doesn't have to be a standalone system. To give you an example, the leasing company could control the access rules for main entrances (and be the only user able to change adjust those rules), and still allow other businesses within the building to specify their own rules for the access rights within their suite. Another strong suit for the Brivo ACS systems is that the user interfaces are quite simple to learn, which means the system could be easily managed by a company's CEO or HR department without requiring hours upon hours of training.
