New Pacom CEO eyes more than banks

ANAHEIM, Calif.—This year's ASIS International event was the first as CEO for Johan Lembre, who assumed the position Aug. 1 at Pacom following the departure of Magnus Jonsson. With nine years at Axis Communications on his resume, he is experienced with IP-based security technology and wants to capitalize on panel-maker Pacom's long history with IP communications. Specifically, he believes Pacom's technology is well-suited for enabling integrators and installers to offer managed services, as Diebold has done successfully, for example.

First, however, he wants to escape the pigeonhole that says Pacom is for the financial marketplace only. “We have traditionally been in banking and finance,” said Lembre, “and we do that very well, but over the last couple of years we've morphed into other areas where the customer is configured with multiple sites. We want to be more focused on new verticals and new avenues.”

Specifically, he sees the education market, where you have multiple buildings on a single campus, or the health-care vertical, or multi-store retail, as prime targets for Pacom's technology and solutions. “We already have some reference customers on board,” he said, “but as a company we haven't actively gone after those markets.”

For integrators who are interested in those markets, and like the RMR model of managed services, Pacom feels it has a good solution. “Diebold is using our backbone for their remote managed services,” Lembre said, “and they're really leading with our product in the remote managed access control offering. We see that with a lot of resellers now. We want to work with them to provide additional remote services.”

One offering Pacom has developed is a new Security Portal, a dashboard-based piece of software that allows end users to quickly process the information being generated by their security system through the use of charts and graphs. 

“We met with some security managers in banks,” said Lembre, “and they said, 'I'd really like to be able to have data for my managers to justify the costs, and it has to be user friendly to generate.' And that's what we're providing with the Security Portal. It's alarm information, status information, you can see if there's a trend on a certain door or employee. You can see if you've had a lot of blocked cards trying to be used on a specific site, and you can figure out why. If it's the same person that's been trying the card, you should contact them, etc. That's what the dashboard will highlight.”

Pacom plans to market this directly to the end user, said Lembre. “And it's not just about driving the business,” he said. “It's also about understanding the industry. You can't sit behind the channel too much. You have to be out there and meet your customers and that's how you understand how the end technology can be utilized.”