Arriving in Orlando late yesterday and yearning for warm weather, I was greeted by a cold slap in the face—30 degrees in what is generally known as sunny and warm Florida. Coming in on the tail end of a cold snap, the sun revisited today and warm temperatures began to rebound to the norm.
The BICSI show kicked off yesterday in a new venue, Mickey Mouse land and the Coronado Springs Resort and with bleary-eyed Registered Communications Distribution Designers, Registered Information Technology Professionals and other credential holders earning their continuing education credits at this focused training event.
BICSI is known as the conference for the information technology and transport systems industry and the organization is also a standards-making body, so education is front and center of everything they do. There's also the BICSI Cabling Skills Challenge, now in its fifth year, where BICSI ITS Installers and Technicians compete for the Installer of the Year accolade.
There's much more talk of IP networks, convergence and integration, no big surprise. The security component is here as well. There's the new Electronic Safety and Security (ESS) credential that's proving popular with technicians and installers, with rapidly evolving and integrating solutions beyond the network grid. And PSA Security is on board with BICSI and assisting with that education, as Bill Bozeman, president and CEO and Sharon Shaw, director of education, presented a topic on Leveraging New Technologies to Generate Monthly Revenue Streams.
On the exhibit floor, seems there's more software and new enclosures with the emphasis on data centers and efficiency reigning supreme. Red Cloud is here, the access control solution engineered from the ground up by IT and security veterans—it's the company formerly known as PlaSec. Other security names as well are present, including Panasonic Systems Solutions, Viking Electronics, Network Video Technologies and HID global—as our security world continues to migrate and converge with information technology systems.
