While the product segment of physical security information management (PSIM) has been established within the security industry for some time now, depending on who you talk to, the characteristics that define a true PSIM solution are up for debate. It seems as if almost everyone has their own definition of what a PSIM is and what it should do. However, Verint is looking to differentiate itself from the competition by establishing a new category of situational awareness and has made enhancements to its product offerings to that end.
According to Kevin Wine, vice president of marketing for video and situation intelligence solutions at Verint, the company has been continually engaged with its customers and looking at how to create better value for end users. As a result of this interaction, Wine said what they discovered was a need for this situational awareness product sector, which really goes above and beyond what has been available to the market up until this point with traditional PSIM solutions.
“Situational awareness is really a category to distinguish from PSIM, VMS or even computer-aided dispatch and the reason for it is as you go into the typical fusion center or command and control center, there has typically been a siloed effect or a manual or process requirement to really get the sensor array, monitoring and incident management, which is typically separate, and dispatch and field force response area that also usually operates separately, to kind of homogenize and flow better,” explained Wine. “The citizens, with everything that’s going mobile and this Internet of Things era that we’re in, are expecting coordination, increased safety and increased efficiency.”
Among the new capabilities in the Verint Situational Awareness Platform that are on display at ASIS this year include:
- Dispatch Manager functionality, which incorporates emergency dispatch into the Situational Awareness Platform, helping reduce emergency response time, while enhancing end-to-end communications throughout an incident.
- Mobile Reporter capabilities, which enable businesses, agencies and local citizens to share information directly from their smart devices, allowing multi-dimensional response and communication. Mobile Reporter also can send emergency notifications based on the location of the user.
- And, Mobile Responder functionality that relays critical information and multimedia data from an incident, providing field personnel with more real-time, accurate intelligence about an incident before arriving on-site.
Wine said that these features are not just being unveiled at the show, but have already been deployed in the field by some of their customers.
“We feel this is really going to create a unique value proposition for a wide range of customers that are both in mid-tier, government or city/municipalities and in many type of campus scenarios as well,” he added. “What I like to say from an industry perspective… a way to look at this is kind of the homogenization of what people traditionally look at as PSIM and CAD altogether.”
Wine believes that one of the big drivers for technology development throughout the security industry moving forward will be the Internet of Things that is enabling organizations to derive greater intelligence from myriad devices.
“We see that as one of the major things that is evolving in the market at large and that certainly goes beyond the security industry. We’re also looking at the changing face or risk and how that’s being viewed by organizations throughout the marketplace,” said Wine.
