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COVER STORY
in their devices to deliver communications clearly, crisply and in a timely manner.”
Critical Infrastructure
Jonathan Berman, the president and general manager of Open Op- tions believes his position in the market as a premier access control company depends on their interconnectivity of systems.
“Part of that critical infrastructure is to combine video and audio to respond to critical situations at a moment’s notice,” Berman said. “The ability to tie it all together, access, video and audio is fundamen- tal to the success of our clients.”
Jason Schimpf, vice president of the Product/Partner Programs at AMAG Technology did not even mention access control as a descrip- tion of who AMAG is. He prefers “Unified Security Platform.”
“AMAG is the technology platform within G4S,” Schimpf said. “Historically we were known as an access control platform. In recent years we have repositioned our company as a unified security solu- tion platform. Security executives have been telling us that they need a robust, flexible complete unified security platform. So, we consider video management, visitor management, guest management, and in- telligent, intelligible and actionable communications as core to our platform. The criteria for intelligent communications is the ability to hear in any situation, be interoperable with our unified platform and, in today’s world, provide cyber defensibility.”
Phil Aronson, president of Aronson Security Group could not agree more.
“To really have full situational awareness you must be able to get all the information you need at the time of need,” Aronson said. “We can no longer deploy silos of excellence. We must have a fully in- teroperable solution that provides two-way communication with ac-
cess and video, so you can virtually respond to any incident real-time, without the lag time of a guard response. It is the only way you can truly be present at the time of need. But, you must have voice clarity in your intelligent communications solution.
“If you don’t, then you might as well not deploy it. We recom- mend developing a use case and really testing the audio quality under different simulated environmental conditions. We also recommend testing for cyber defensibility before you deploy. Intelligent commu- nications is becoming a critical offering for the platform providers because of the rapidly evolving threat conditions.”
An Audio Partnership
Voice is becoming critical to the operation and to the security pro- gram. It provides a level of engagement at the time of need not found in other applications. The business model is changing. Access control providers are evolving into business process optimization and busi- ness intelligence platforms. Access control is something they do, not who they are becoming.
Video Management Systems are recognizing the need to integrate voice into the video for situational awareness and actionable response and the end user is beginning to value intelligent communications as the means to not only engage their users at the time of need, but also deliver compelling value in deploying resources
within a process by embedding audio and voice
throughout their organization. Communication is
always critical, not just at the time of an incident.
Are the machines you are buying and deploy- ing ready for the age of voice?
Jim Hoffpauir is the president of Zenitel USA.