Partner Practice

Nov 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Ashley Roe

Suppliers in the security industry are realizing the advantages of collaboration over competition in producing converged and integrated technologies that better serve the market. User demand is a driving force behind the converged technologies resulting from supplier collaboration, and the industry is seeing a wave of new alliances, partnerships and agreements formed by major and minor security vendors. As the industry migrates toward partnerships, what do users need to know to navigate the new market landscape?

Past and present

“Years ago, the security market was very simple,” explains Paul Pierce, a Ph.D. candidate conducting research at Lund University's Institute of Economic Research, a part of the Lund University School of Economics and Management in Sweden. “If you were a user or a systems integrator, you could call one company and they would provide you with everything you needed to create an end-to-end solution. From cables to digital video recorders to cameras, you would be secure in your decision to purchase every piece of equipment from one supplier.”

Economics and Management in Sweden. “If you were a user or a systems integrator, you could call one company and they would provide you with everything you needed to create an end-to-end solution. From cables to digital video recorders to cameras, you would be secure in your decision to purchase every piece of equipment from one supplier.”

Pierce, along with two other Ph.D. students and two professors, make up the research staff of the LUSAX Security Informatics Research Program. The four-year program was established in March 2006 as a joint venture of ASSA ABLOY, Axis Communications and Securitas Systems to develop a framework for understanding the strategic, organizational and technological challenges of the security sector. Pierce focuses his research in part on how suppliers organize alliances in regard to new product development.

According to Pierce, companies today are more likely to buy systems from a wider range of different suppliers. They may choose to go with one company to cover their access control needs, but elect to use another company's products for video surveillance. Many suppliers have developed expertise in one or two areas of technology instead of becoming “one-stop shops” offering a myriad of various solutions for different security needs.

Sandy Jones of Sandra Jones and Company, a security industry consulting firm based in Chardon, Ohio, confirms that there has been more partnership and integration activity developing over the past few years. “Opportunities for partnerships have grown because there are many more applications and many more types of security today,” Jones says. “The trend is indicative of people being creative and finding new solutions and new ways to complete a task.”

Historically, the strategy to create end-to-end product lines was realized by supplier mergers and acquisitions. “Security, in the past, was also a hardware business. For example, one company was a specialist in making access control and another specialized in video,” Jones explains. Specialty companies merged and combined their products. “The truth was, however, those products did not necessarily work together,” Jones says. Ultimately, companies needed to integrate as opposed to just consolidating their product lines.

More choices and new value

Users have more choices and more freedom to choose solutions in today's market than years ago. Joshua Phillips, director of strategic alliances for Lenel Systems International Inc., Pittsford, N.Y., says the user is guiding the supplier partnership trend by asking for non-proprietary products that can interoperate. “No matter what kind of security project they are working on, customers feel more comfortable when manufacturers have made their technologies compatible,” he says. “It lessens the risk of making a bad decision and allows the customer to choose what they think is best for their project.”

Products produced through supplier collaboration also tend to take on more value than their original legacy components. “When two companies come together to partner and integrate technology, there is often a synergistic value created that did not exist before that,” Phillips says. When combined, the technologies might be able to solve more security needs than each was originally meant to solve separately. In Lenel's case, applications for the new integrated product could extend well beyond what Lenel offered on its own, Phillips says.

In 1999, Lenel created its OpenAccess Alliance Program (OAAP), opening up the interface to OnGuard, its comprehensive security management platform, and allowing manufacturers to integrate their products to the system. Integration is accomplished by writing a necessary API based on the OnGuard API documentation provided by Lenel. An API, or application programming interface, is a source code interface that contains the building blocks necessary to create new applications and to develop additional software interfaces to existing products.

Lenel partners develop and write their APIs based on documentation and standards provided by Lenel on its Web site. A Lenel quality control engineer then examines and tests the API for certification and provides the partner with a certification letter. There are currently 40 Lenel partners enrolled in OAAP with existing certified interfaces and another 100 companies that have taken steps to become partners.

Phillips says Lenel wanted to bring customers an open-architecture philosophy. “We did not want a proprietary system. We saw a market demand from the customer for open architecture products,” he says. Customers wanted to know that there would eventually be a way for their existing products in use to be supported by more than one manufacturer. With this, Phillips explains, customers actually began encouraging prospective Lenel partners to join its program.

At ASIS 2007, Lenel featured its OpenAccess Partner Pavillion, which showcased products of eight system manufacturers that had used Lenel APIs to develop an interface between their products and the OnGuard platform. One integrated product offering developed through a partnership between Lexington, Mass.-based Imprivata and Lenel manages physical and logical access control. OnGuard manages which users can access which doors, while the Imprivata product manages who can log onto a network. Phillips says one of the measures the integrated product prevents is tailgating. If a user enters a building without swiping his or her access card, for example, by tailgating behind another authorized user, he or she may be barred from logging onto the network. “When you put these two products together, customers can now enforce new policies and groups. They can enforce things such as time-and-attendance issues, tailgating, and if there's a situation where someone is suspected of wrongdoing, you can confirm their involvement,” he says. “In putting these products together, all of a sudden there is this new value that extends beyond what the two suppliers do all by themselves.”

Following IT's lead

If the partnering trend in the security industry is following the path of practices in the IT industry, it's no surprise that Cisco Systems Inc., San Jose, Calif., is another active player in partnerships. Cisco devoted its presence at the ASIS show to showcasing IP innovations and interoperability. “We wanted to show how Cisco is using the network as a platform, with different applications that have formerly been disparate partnering together,” says Bob Beliles, senior manager of physical security and market management for Cisco. “We wanted to highlight certain areas, so you saw partners and vendors for example with video analytics systems, camera systems and command-and-control systems”

Beliles says that users' physical security product needs mirror those needs of IT users in that both are demanding more complex and complete solutions. “The need for partnering in IT arose years ago to make sure the customer could be successful with a more complete solution,” he says. “There was also a lack of a standard to build interoperable solutions on, and fundamentally, that is what drove partnerships in IT and what is driving them in security.”

Steve Collen, Cisco director of business development for physical security, adds: “Like IT, the security market is more fragmented; security solutions are multifaceted, and that means from a technology perspective that it's difficult for one company to provide everything.” Paradoxically, he says, customers want a simple solution. “We simply could not deliver everything we wanted to deliver,” Collen says.

Cisco has approximately 50 partners in the physical security sector. The company uses a number of criteria to rank partners within seven technology areas, including access control, video analytics, storage, cameras, displays, command-and-control and analog devices. Cisco's IP network serves as the platform for many of its integrated product offerings. “Our whole existence is built around IP; it is our standard for openness and interoperability, which is actually really different in prevailing modes of thought of other physical security providers,” Collen says.

In 2006, Cisco and ASSA ABLOY, Stockholm, Sweden, announced a partnership to integrate Cisco's IT security tools with ASSA ABLOY's physical access control products. Out of the partnership, the networked door, which combines Cisco's IP-based access control technology with ASSA ABLOY's external locking and scanning components, was born. According to both companies, it's an example of how they integrated technologies to simplify the installation and operation of card readers and locks. The networked door identifies events and locations where a user's credentials are scanned at a physical access point and then scanned in order to access a company's IT network. If both scan events occur in different locations, the company is warned of a potential threat. The integrated technology also helps users meet data access verification compliance requirements.

User benefits

Integrated technologies can also allow users to operate their products more efficiently and easily. ObjectVideo, Reston, Va., has created a network of OEM partnerships with its OnBoard software for digital signal processors (DSPs). The technology is embedded as an application into cameras, digital video recorders and other IP devices manufactured by ObjectVideo partners.

In September, ObjectVideo launched OV Ready, an XML-based intelligent video network protocol for standardized analytics, communication and integration among devices of ObjectVideo partners. XML, or extensible markup language, is a software language designed to allow disparate systems to share data. The protocol provides device manufacturers with universal compatibility among any video management system that adopts the ObjectVideo standard. “OV Ready benefits everyone in a certain way. The video management platform provider can now allow users to control functionality from an interface that they are already accustomed to using, and integrators have a greater choice of suppliers that they can specify for their solutions,” says Ed Troha, director of marketing for ObjectVideo.

Product integration provides the biggest benefit to the end-user, Troha says. “In the ideal world, the integrator has a choice for any number of platforms, cameras, encoders, routers and storage devices. All they have to do is essentially pick and choose and drop in, so the integrator will spend a lot less time and extend fewer dollars of their customer because they don't have to sit in the middle and complete all of the integration work,” Troha explains.

Users and integrators — and complications

For security product integrators, partnerships create new responsibility to serve as the operational link in implementing newly integrated products successfully. “You have greater flexibility in choosing a product today than you did back then, but you also need greater knowledge today about the products you're buying than you did back then,” Pierce says. “The reason is because more work may be required for the setup of an integrated system. There are not many people out there that have the knowledge to do this.” Adds Jones, “An integrator's job is exactly that, they integrate to ensure that products work together. It is the integrators job to stay current and knowledgeable with the technology. Partnerships create a new role of distribution and really solidify the need and role of the systems integrator.”

Complications in the integration and implementation process can happen most frequently because of the amount of people now involved in the process, according to Phillips. “Getting everyone on the same page is a complicated matter.” In a situation where an API is used as a route for integration, complications can also occur when interfaces are not maintained over the lifecycle of owning the product. “Customers have the expectation that when they buy something that is integrated, that it will always be integrated,” Phillips says. “The software that an interface is built on matures; it's a natural progression. Interfaces have to be maintained, and both systems need to be continuously updated with every new product update and version release.”

With so many people now involved in the integration process, who does the user contact when they have an issue with an integrated product? “Generally, the responsibility of the interface falls on whoever developed the interface. However, it's really both companies that users come to rely on,” Phillips says. In Lenel's case, Lenel ensures that OnGuard is functioning properly and takes steps to help the customer or integrator figure out a problem. The integration partner is responsible for continually updating their systems to ensure functionality with OnGuard. “A lot of problems that arise are just configuration issues within the user's own environment and are fairly easy to solve,” Phillips says.

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© 2008 Penton Media Inc.

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