ISC West kicks off with new companies, new products

LAS VEGAS--The industry has gathered once again here in Sin City at ISC West, and the event continues to be a major landmark on the industry calendar. A slew of new products have seen the light of day here for the first time, and a number of companies have taken the opportunity to introduce themselves to the marketplace. DSC, a comforting sea of red in the right corner of the show floor, once again made news by signing, on the show floor, a contract with Exceptional Innovation's Life|Ware to finalize a partnership that was first announced at last year's ISC West. "Now we're actually doing it," joked Marilee Harris, DSC director of marketing. The initial partnership to bring home automation software to DSC's security channel was based on an HP platform that HP soon after stopped producing, which threw a wrench into plans. "We had to configure everything so that it's the right platform for us," Harris said. Plus, "this is not a traditional box sale, so we had to ensure we had the training right, had the customer support right. This is the evolution of the partnership." In other partnership news, Verint and storage giant EMC were talking up their collaboration, which was announced at last year's ASIS International show, as EMC announced a new focus on providing end users physical security and risk assessment, system design, and an implementation and support offering. All of this, said Dick O'Leary, senior director, global solutions group, at EMC, is not intended "to do the same thing that other assessors do. We're doing physical security with an eye on how enterprise-level security can impact that." However, EMC will need installation partners and, with its existing IT customer base, it can be a great evangelist for IP-based physical security, said Mariann McDonough, vice president of global marketing for Verint. "Having an EMC-led offering drives opportunity," she said. UTC Fire & Security is looking to drive opportunity by consolidating its vision and focus for its four manufacturing brands in the physical security space, Lenel, Onity, Verex and Guardall. Duncan Gillis, president of UTC's Global Security Products Group, said UTC has a new focus on interoperability, both within its own product lines and with other products in the market. "We're going to harness our expertise," he said, "and build our technical knowledge to build the most hassle-free security solutions in the market." Perhaps one of the biggest stirs of the day was caused by OnSSI, which has released here their new Ocularis platform, a software piece that provides top management for all of the software maker's other products. It has three main selling points, said Gadi Piran, president and chief technical officer at OnSSI. It first introduces an elegant new way of working with video that Piran called "a completely different user experience ... In my opinion you'll see people running to mimic this concept." Secondly, it introduces GPS and GIS mapping, so that all of the video can be experienced in a geographic setting. Finally, it offers "integration on the fly," whereby fire panels, access control software, any number of components, can be integrated into the OnSSI software in a way "that actually doesn't require, in many cases, any software development," Piran said. "We move the integration to the configuration level." This will allow integrators to do the product integration without having to bring a new product back to OnSSI to deal with. These developments, Piran said, are why OnSSI experience more than 1,000 visitors in a single day at ISC West for the first time. And it's developments like these that keep people coming to ISC West in the first place.