Viscount will be highly visible at ASIS

Viscount, the access control system that is software-based and does not have a panel, will be highly visible at ASIS, according to CEO Dennis Raefield.

Raefield joined Viscount at COO in December of 2013 and became CEO of the company, replacing Steve Pineau, in January of 2014. In February, Viscount "raised $2.4 million in new cash in a  private placement." He's used that funding to "staff up" adding tech support and sales people including hiring Michael Pilato, as VP of sales and marketing. Pilato has worked for Schlage/Ingersoll Rand, Assa Abloy, Honeywell Security, and Sensormatic/Software House (now Tyco).

"We went from 26 to 36 employees," Raefield said. "We now have dedicated tech support from 5 a.m. to 5 p.m. and on-call support 24/7," he said.

Viscount has been in business for 12 years, but its Freedom Encryption Bridge access control product is relatively new. It made traction with the federal government, in banking and it is  installed at Microsoft's GSOC.

"Our biggest deal is with the Department of Homeland Security, the CIS (Citizens Immigration Services) Group. [Freedom] is installed all over the country in 30 different sites and the plan is to roll out 200 more sites in the next year," Raefield said.

Freedom is doing well for two reasons, Raefield said. "One. It's highly secure from hacking for a very simple reason. The traditional [access control] panel has a database ... that is highly vulnerable to hacking. ... What we did is very simple. We took that database out of the panel," he explained. "We use a little thing called a bridge that converts all information at the door ... sends it to the company's own computer. Our software is on their server and the server makes the decision [about access]." This makes the IT director much more comfortable than a traditional access control system where a security appliance that is out of the IT director's hands is hanging on the company's network, he said.

Because the Freedom access control system is behind a company's firewall, it is as secure as any other application on an end user's network, Raefield pointed out.

Raefield noted that the recent Target data breach which received so much publicity and resulted in the firing of the Target CEO "was not a frontal assault on the IT infrastructure" but rather a "backdoor breach"—the result of a stolen HVAC contractor's password. That kind of backdoor breach cannot happen with this access control system, he said.

The second reason the federal government likes Freedom, according to Raefield, is that "our little bridge is much less expensive that anyone's panel. ... "You take out the expensive control panel and the dedicated computer for security and you now have a significaly lower total cost of ownership," he said.

The security director now can worrry about physical security instead of managing hardware and computers, he added.

Viscount Systems did about $4.1 million in revenue in 2013. About $3 million of that came from Viscount's legacy telephone entry system, a product called Mesh Enterphone, which is used in highrise buildings. It's been a "stable bread and butter" product for Viscount for 12 years. Raefield is also investing in that product, making it "high end with a touch screen." It can also be integrated with the Freedom access control system. The remaining $1 million in 2013 revenue was from Freedom, which Raefield said went from $0 to $1 million in one year. Raefield expects Viscount, which is a publicly traded company based in Vancouver, to do "between $6 and $8 million" in revenue in 2014.

Asked about whether Freedom can be used as a managed access control system, Raefield said yes. "The long term strategy is that [Freedom] will be able to be managed on site, in the cloud, any of the above, because it's all software."

Viscount is currently working with major integrators such as Stanley, Convergint and Johnson Controls. At ASIS, the company plans to make its case from a big booth to the integrator community that "this is the next direction and a smart direction," Raefield said.

Pilato said that Freedom has been rigorously tested by the federal government, it has shown itself to be "secure, scalable architecture" and it's ready for wider deployment in the commercial market, in K-12 schools, in banking and elsewhere. "ASIS will be the official commercial launch of Freedom," Pilato said. "The commercial side of the house is ready for prime time."