It seems that in recent years security system manufacturers and software development companies have been working together to provide a streamlined interface for end users. An access control manufacturer’s efforts should obviously be concentrated on card readers and the software for monitoring and control, but through the use of API’s and SDK’s an access control software can be tailored to communicate with say… an IP camera system produced by  a completely different manufacturer. The same is true with visitor management systems, burglar alarms, time and attendance systems, and even personnel management systems such as Blackboard, Peoplesoft,  Active  Directory, and even logical security systems for access to your computer network.

These integrations are usually sold as a means to reduce labor and provide ease of use in finding video, entering cards, etc., however it is my belief is that some integrations are almost necessary.  For example, burglar alarms in a class A office space with a large amount of employees are almost always a nuisance and as a result are seldom used to the systems potential. It is bad policy decision to give multiple users the same code to arm and disarm an alarm system for obvious reasons. If one bad apple spoils the bunch, that one code needs to be changed and a new code distributed. Also, the ability for an audit trail is greatly compromised. If everybody has the same code, how could one use reporting to find out who accessed the building after hours and made a mess in the lunch room? There are downfalls in using the alarm keypad to manage this many codes as well. It is undoubtedly a maintenance nightmare.

How does integration with an access control system help?

For starters, all alarm zones can be routed through input points that are managed in the access control software. This allows an intuitive method of bypassing and running reports on field devices such as motion detectors, glassbreak detectors, etc. No more scrolling through a keypad to find out which motion detector caused the false alarm.

Proximity cards can be used to arm and disarm the system. Yes, this offers a degraded level of security because the bad guy could pick up a dropped card in the parking lot and have free reign to the office but these risks can be reduced by using card plus pin (PIN’s managed through the access control software) or biometric verification.

Choke points for entry/exit to your facility can normally be created eliminating the need for multiple keypads. For example, if there are 6 doors into the space each having card readers but the keypad is only at the main entrance, the other 5 card readers can be disabled while the alarm is armed.

Remote administration can be used to verify that the alarm is armed or disarm it for cleaning crews all from home. Many burglar alarms have software packages that can be used to dial into the panel over a POTS line and do some basic administration but I have yet to see one that is even remotely intuitive for the user.

What are your thoughts? Is integration between systems worth a premium?

Intelligent Access Systems was recognized in Inc. 5000 list of America’s Fastest Growing Private Companies in the recent addition of Inc Magazine.  Intelligent Access Systems was ranked number 1235 in the 2010 list which was published for the September edition and is available online at Inc. 5000 List.  This is a great accomplishment for the company and we look forward to continued growth in the future.  Congratulations to all the employees at Intelligent Access Systems who make awards such as these happen.

Is there anyone out there who is involved with the electronic security industry that cannot find something in the CCTV world to be excited about? Our industry is in the process of overhauling the technology we use and there is some awesome R&D going on in the CCTV space.  We’ve got all flavors of network cameras and IP cameras…HD quality, H.264 compression, multi megapixel, etc.  The manufacturers of all these technologies really have something to look forward to…or do they?

Last week, while at Security Xchange in Utah, I had the pleasure of meeting with Gary Clinton from Clinton Electronics from the Chicago area.  Gary showed me a camera transmitting HD resolution video over a standard 75 Ohm coax cable.  Now I didn’t have any gadgets to test the resolution, but I can tell you the resolution was amazing.  My main comment was “it looks great but how much is this going to cost.”  Gary informed me that a company called Gennum is changing the game with this new reasonably priced SDI chip which will allow manufacturers to transmit HD quality video over coax cables just as the cable providers like Time Warner, Charter, and Comcast do.  Now that is something that is interesting to me considering there are millions of CCTV cameras out there with coaxial cable infrastructure.

I’m certainly not promoting this technology.  I’m going to take the wait and see approach.  However, what I saw was certainly impressive.  Will this technology be the “big bang” or a “big flop” in the electronic security industry?  I know that the network camera world has certainly taken over everyone’s interest.  Industry sales of network and IP cameras are certainly on the rise and we see this trend in our sales at Intelligent Access Systems.  Does “HD over the coax” have a place in the market?  Only the consumers can answer that.  For me personally, I don’t think it will be a “big bang” or a “big flop.”  I think there will certainly be a place for this technology but I don’t think it’s going to take over the world.

Why do I feel this way?  There are just too many end users out there that want the megapixel resolution cameras but don’t want to deal with their IT group and to have the discussion about how much bandwidth their cameras are taking up.  There will be many that will likely decide to use this new “HD over the coax” technology to upgrade their existing systems and stay off the network.  Make no mistake about it though.  The network camera manufacturers are making this a hard case to sell with their H.264 compression.  They are getting most of the R&D money and they plan on selling their equipment.  Who wins in the end?  In my opinion, it will be the network camera world but this new coax technology will certainly take some sales away from them.  How many sales?  We’ll have to let the end users decide that.

We recently had a meeting with our website design firm to discuss phase II of our new website and also to discuss search engine optimization (SEO).  In case you didn’t know it, our core business has nothing to do with website design, so we pay the experts to help us.  We are your experts with network cameras, card readers, and perimeter protection systems but we’ve got allot to learn about this SEO thing.  Thankfully for us, we’ve got Jon Jordan and the folks from Atlantic BT on our team.

This meeting with Jon taught me exactly how much I don’t know when it comes to our web presence.  I came into the meeting loaded with questions about some competitors with really weak websites that get ranked much higher by Google in the primary key word searches and how they pull it off.  What I learned is that these competitors aren’t doing anything special and in fact are making some big mistakes.  The truth is they are ranked high because nobody is giving them any competition for those keywords.  If we get our website right, we should be able to get our page rank higher than the competition so it will be easy for prospects to find us.

We’ve grown consistently over the last six years and have never had a good web presence.  We’ve had to grow the old fashion way, but it’s time that we adopt some of the latest marketing strategies which I hope will make our sales teams job a little easier.  I’m excited about this new endeavor and I’m sure Jon and his team at Atlantic BT can help us achieve success on the web.  It’s time to get to work and get the job done.  Keep checking the new website for new enhancements and Google the keywords.  We’re looking to dominate the keywords of “security cameras”, “network c cameras”, “IP cameras”, “card readers”, and etc. for each of the market we’re in.  We will be focusing on localizing the keywords so make sure you add the cities like Raleigh, Richmond, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, or Tampa to those searches.  Keep checking because we’re going to get it to a top 3 position with each search.

During a recent new hire orientation I was asked one of the most important questions in any small business: Why do clients choose to do business with Intelligent Access Systems?  The answer is something many people I run into fail to articulate clearly about their business.  Thankfully for me, I’ve had many opportunities to polish my elevator pitch but it’s a good thing to continue to practice it.

The truth is that our clients choose to do business with IAS because they trust that we will always do the right thing.  Don’t get me wrong we’re not perfect and will make mistakes.  However, there are some significant differences between “doing the right thing” and “doing things right.”  The most important being that people who “do the right thing” do whatever is necessary when they don’t do something right.  When you approach every situation with this in mind you have the opportunity to become a trusted partner with your clients.

Since I have been a part of IAS, this has always been the motto.  I think I can speak for Jack Johnson and the rest of the team at IAS with this statement.  If you understand how IAS got to where it is today, you can understand why we embrace that motto.  Every office that IAS opened was a bootstrapped small business with a vision.  I know this because I was involved in starting all of them except the Atlanta office, but I’ve been around the company long enough to know how Jack started the Atlanta office too.  Each of the employees that founded the IAS offices had to build the business one customer at a time and focused on never losing a good customer.  We all understood and still understand the value of a good customer so we do everything we can to become that trusted partner who they can count on to help them make their business better.

It is my belief that our core values are the cornerstone of our success.  No reason to go into our core values as you can read them on the website, but it’s safe to say that these core values are what we live.  While they were not formalized on paper until a couple of years ago, they were being embraced as we opened each branch office.  Today, Intelligent Access Systems has grown into a much bigger organization than it was in 1991 when Jack started the Atlanta office.  We are a growing organization, but we still stand by the same principals as when we were bootstrapped and pretty much insignificant.  Our capabilities and regional presence has grown, but not because of a major sales campaign; because of word of mouth for the most part.

I think people choose to buy from Intelligent Access Systems because of who we are and not because of price or size.  Customers can always find someone bigger or smaller to partner with and can usually find someone cheaper if that is what they are looking for.  We’ve got great people at IAS and we are consistent with that we do.  We continue to invest in and develop the great people of IAS and we continue to grow as an organization.  To me, it seems that what we are doing is working so there is no reason to reinvent or change it.

So, I’m sitting here this weekend thinking about Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, and their Pay Per Click options under AdSense.  The question in my head is should  I use pay per click.  After all, we haven’t perfected this search engine optimization thing yet so our Google page rank still is not there yet.  We’re your card reader guys or your network camera guys, and this search engine stuff is not our core competency.  I really need to get those prospects who are perusing the web looking for electronic security integrators to find me instead of my ugly, nasty, and incompetent competitors (who all have halitosis).  Hopefully you all know that I was seeking to provide some humor with those adjectives that described our competitors, but the truth is the that we’ve got to get better on the web because they (our competitors) are getting all the play!

The question remains should we use Google AdSense and their pay per click options to get our name in the forefront for the most common searches for our industry?  I’m just not sure right now to be honest.  First, I’m not sure how long it is going to take us to get our page ranks where we want them.  I need to figure that out first so we can put a weight on our lost opportunities due to not being ranked.  Second, I need to figure out how much keywords like “access control Raleigh”, “ip cameras Richmond”, “network cameras Pittsburgh”, or “managed security services Tampa” would cost me.  I need to figure out a cost so I can do a break even analysis and also so I can look at the return on investment.  If it makes business sense to do it for a month or two to give my team some breathing room while we work on the SE optimization, I would certainly give it a try if I knew other businesses that tried it had positive results.

Let’s face it, Google is a machine.  We spend all kinds of time and money trying to optimize to them and when we don’t do it well, we pay them for pay per click.  What a wonderful business they must have.  It’s actually brilliant when you think about it.  Since they are so smart I’m sure they have all kinds of data that can tell you how many times the words “CCTV cameras Raleigh” or “network cameras Raleigh” are searched for each month.  When it was searched for, how many times did the searcher click on the pay per click ad?  These items should be fairly straight forward for the folks at Google, so maybe I’ll contact them so I could work on a budget for this campaign if I decide to do it.  What I’m really interested in is what other businesses say about SEO and pay per click options.  I’d love to find some forums or blogs that discuss SEO options or pay per click options.  What do other businesses like ours think about these options?  I’d love to hear comments from anyone on this.  After all, we provide network cameras, IP cameras, access control, and card readers solutions for clients, so this is kind of new to me.

If you follow this blog or our Facebook page, you know that Intelligent Access Systems has been working on the rollout of a new ERP system to run the company since last November.  We’re not a company geared for rolling out very large and complex ERP software packages, so we had allot of interesting days along the way.  Recently while sitting in the Chicago O’Hara airport, I got a chance to visit with a friend who runs a very large security cooperative.  To protect my friend, I won’t mention his name but it’s safe to say that he has been down the ERP rollout road before.  We chatted for a second about ERP’s and discussed both companies’ initiatives to rollout new ERP’s for our companies.  He said something that scared the daylights out of me….he said, “Ron, I rolled out an ERP package when I came to our company and they should have fired me afterwards because it was a complete disaster.”  Now, I’m sitting here thinking the lights on my future just got dimmer!  He followed up by saying that this time around he hired a professional project manager to run the process from start to finish.

At this time I am 3-4 months from “going live” with our ERP, had run into many issues, and didn’t hire a professional PM to run the process.  I wondered if I would be telling a similar story that “it was so bad that I should have been fired” to someone in the future.  The truth is, we got it rolled out but with troubles all along the way and our entire company learned allot of lessons.  Now, in the future I may do a blog about the “issues along the way”, but for now I’m just going to focus on the experience and hope to provide some wisdom to others.

The first piece of wisdom is to absolutely know what you are buying.   Now this is my third ERP rollout so I have some experience but still missed the target on this piece.  You need to clafythat what was presented during demonstrations is the actual base product or if it had been enhanced.  Most of the mid to high end ERP solutions have a base package that can be enhanced by you or by the software company or by a vendor of the software company.  Ask the question “is what you showed me the base package or was it enhanced.  If it was an enhanced version, how much will the additional enhancements cost me to get what I saw.”  Watch out for those extras that will need to be added on to get what you thought you were getting.

The second piece of wisdom, don’t expect the member of your team who manages a department or a business for you to manage a rollout while still managing the business.  My experience has been that an ERP rollout requires focus and dedication.  Our business is based on customer focus as most small to mid sized entrepreneurial businesses are, so why divert your teams focus and dedication away from the fuel that fires your business.  Sure they will be involved, but asking them to be responsible for the project has not proven to be wise to me.  All three ERP system rollouts that I have been a part of were done with internal resources that we focused on the customer and we found a way to get through it but it was very hard.  It took me three times to learn this lesson, but hopefully this experience will lead you in another direction.

The third piece of advice is to the ERP companies not the companies buying the packages.  My question is where is your wisdom?  Why is it that ERP companies let you go down so many wrong roads in the initial setup of the package?  Why is it that these companies try to be so accommodating to your ideas that they let you setup things that won’t actually work in the real world?  I’m sure they are proud to show off how flexible their software really is, but your customers actually need your wisdom.  They need you to help them “see around the corners” because they truly don’t completely understand your software during the rollout.  Letting them set something up that will not work puts their business at risk when they actually “go live.”  Now I have an exceptional team at IAS and I’m proud to say we do not employ any idiots.  We were ignorant on the ERP software packages in all three occasions but we are exceptionally good at what we do as our core business.  A little more wisdom from the ERP vendor, in all three occasions, would have made a profound impact on the rollouts.  I’m proud to say that every time I have done a rollout, everyone at our company was proficient and all the functionality of the software worked fine in 4-6 months, but if the rollout went better we wouldn’t have to wait that long to feel like it was a success.

For now, I’ll stop bloviating.  I love a good ERP system and think every growing and thriving business needs one for efficiency as well as accurate reporting and accounting.  Unfortunately, my experience has a bad stain on the purchasing and installing phase of the ERP system life cycle.  Doing these things wrong can completely stop your business, hence causing “Death by ERP.”

Recently I had a call from a customer complaining about a bill for service on a CCTV camera in their parking deck.  It was a cordial conversation, but the customer’s comment was “I just can’t believe that this service ticket is so expensive…It costs as much to repair it as when we put it in new.”  My thoughts were that this statement was an exaggeration and that was confirmed when I reviewed the actual invoice.  It was not the full price of a new camera, but it was just a little less than half of the original cost to get the repair done.  We had a discussion about all the cameras onsite and that this particular one seems to have problems regularly.  From this customer’s perspective, this CCTV camera must have had problems.  It must have been a “lemon” because all the other CCTV cameras never have problems.  I tried to explain that this camera was located on the top floor and was more prone to lightning strike, but I could tell that the customer was not satisfied.  The repair slips from the manufacturer were not absolutely conclusive and read something like “replaced X component, potential lightning damage” so I could tell this conversation was going nowhere.  The customer clearly wanted this service invoice credited, even though IAS had to pay the manufacturer for the repair of this CCTV camera.

So, I decided to shift the conversation to more of a business aspect.  I decided to talk about the life cycle of electronic security equipment and how this customer scheduled the depreciation of this equipment.  After all, this CCTV camera was an older model Pelco Spectra dome that is no longer made.  Pelco is a good company so they are still supporting this particular model for repairs, but it’s really a legacy model.  I asked the customer if he knew how many times this particular camera had been repaired and what is their strategy for repair bills on legacy equipment or any equipment with significant depreciation. 

The question was then asked to figure out exactly how many times he was going to pay a significant repair bill on this CCTV camera.  My rule of thumb has always been that if the repair bill is equal to or greater than the original cost of the equipment, place it with a new one.  That was not the case here as we figured out that the repair bills would have bought the camera more than twice.  He could have purchased a new model Spectra dome twice during all these repairs.  After reviewing the past service tickets, I noticed that we had noted that we offered to add surge protection, check the grounding, and even try to isolated the camera but the customer opted not to do this due to the cost.

Look, I recognize the restrictions that most businesses are under due to budget constraints but sometimes these decisions need to make sense for the business.  I asked the question “is it prudent to do nothing to change the situation and continue to pay these repair bills on this legacy camera?”  I can appreciate a customer trying to do the right thing for their company by negotiating for a credit when reasonable.  However, to me it was not reasonable for our company to take the responsibility for this legacy camera.  After all, this was a “take over” for us and we did not even install the camera originally but had been performing the service for several years. 

We concluded the conversation with a discussion about service contracts.  Service contracts are something that I have never quite understood why more people don’t purchase them.  Maybe it’s because we just don’t do a good job of selling them.  We probably have the fear of looking like the people at OfficeMax or Best Buy who will try to sell you a two year replacement plan on the keychain or pencil you are trying to buy.  But the truth is service contracts on electronic security equipment makes good business sense to me.  I think one of the problems is that a good percentage of people have been complacent about security equipment.  They don’t care about it until they need it.  My feeling is exactly the opposite.  Why risk your companies brand or get a serious stain on your department’s reputation by not being able to provide adequate security?  You can flatten out your O&M budget for the most part and get training and preventative maintenance included!  Is it a no-brainer?  For this customer, we’ll have to wait and see.  He’s going to review the options and get back to us.  Hopefully we’ve made a convincing argument and he can see the value in a service contract in this scenario.  After all, the first thing we are going to do if a service plan is implemented is to replace the legacy CCTV camera with a newer model and add surge protection.  And yes, it’s all included under the service plan.

Over the last couple months, we at Intelligent Access Systems having been working on the rollout of a new company website.  Now I’m no website designer by any means and certainly have no training in any of the modern web languages.  I tinkered years ago and built 5 or 6 websites on a volunteer basis for some organizations that I was involved in.  For the organizations, it was a free website and for me it was free practice.  Everyone was happy, so what more could anyone ask for?

So I entered our new company project with optimism and confidence thinking I had some background that would apply.  Boy was I wrong.  I’m thinking…I want to tell customers and prospects about our business on the web.  I figure a few nice pictures and a little creative copy and we’re online.  We’ll talk a little about card access, CCTV, burglar alarms, emergency communications, and we’ll dedicate a special page or two to IP cameras or network cameras.  Not that simple.

I knew I was in trouble when the one of the first topics in the project kickoff meeting was “SEO”.  I wasn’t familiar with the acronym until they told me it was “search engine optimization”, which I was a little familiar with.  However, I wasn’t familiar with how complex it is.  You actually need a strategy for that stuff.  I thought it would be pretty easy to be a top five in google when someone searched for “Raleigh card access” or “tampa network cameras.”  Turns out, it not exactly that simple and it requires more than just fees to google.  We opened this project with two real goals:

1. To have one of the premier website for companies like us
2. To be a top five in the search engines for each of the products and markets we serve

So, from the beginning this has been more than what we expected.  It’s been an interesting and fun project, and we’ve got a long ways to go to reach all of our goals.  This is going to be an awesome site when we’re 100% complete and we’re going to talk about card access, CCTV, managed security services, wireless mesh, and all the cool stuff that is going on in the industry.  We’re even going to find a way to be one of the top five picks from google for the markets of Atlanta, Raleigh, Richmond, Pittsburgh, and Tampa so it’s easy for you to find us.  We’re not there yet.  But stay tuned and keep checking our blog and the site!  We’ll get there and then we can celebrate another milestone in the life of Intelligent Access Systems!