Honeywell secures Alaskan army hospital

MINNEAPOLIS--Honeywell announced in late July a contract for $2.5 million worth of security integration at Bassett Army Community Hospital, located at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska. The job, to be completed by Honeywell's Building Management division, involves NexWatch access control, to be linked with Honeywell's Enterprise Building Integrator, a building management platform that includes software suites for building, security, life-safety, and energy management. Since Fort Wainwright already was using EBI for its fire system, it only made sense to tack on the security management suite, said Greg Turner, director of global offer management for Honeywell Building Management. In today's IP environment, Turner said integrating security, though they've done it for three decades, is simply easier to combine with his division's traditional building management jobs. However, since Honeywell acquired the Pittway Group in 2000, Building Management has had to balance long-standing relationships with its own company's new security-product manufacturing capabilities. "We have a very good working relationship with the differing Honeywell groups," Turner said, "and we try to work with their dealer channels. Our goal is to work as a super integrator, across more than just the security market." Thus, with the NexWatch solution, which will handle multiple card technologies because of the mix of access needs in the community hospital, the actual install will be sub-contracted out to local Alaskan Honeywell dealers. Also, even though there is much talk about one person at a facility managing everything from HVAC to video surveillance, "our customers still operate in a silo-ed environment," said Turner. "So, in the data center, there's one server controlling it all, but the facilities guy will have a computer that allows only the HVAC and building management, while the security guy will only be able to control the video and access. That way, we don't have to maintain two different IP structures. As more equipment becomes IP enabled, it's made it much easier to install and make use of the IP environment."