AMAG hones in on visitor management, credential authentication and compliance

TORRANCE, Calif.—AMAG Technology, a provider of access control, video and security management systems, this week introduced Symmetry CONNECT, an enterprise-wide software platform designed to help multi-site organizations operate more efficiently, mitigate risk and reduce operating costs.

Symmetry CONNECT offers multi-site organizations a software solution that automates processes to improve security and to meet compliance and audit requirements. Many multi-site organizations do audit and compliance work manually, Symmetry CONNECT allows organizations to easily automate these processes, AMAG president Matt Barnette told Security Systems News.

AMAG parent company G4S purchased Touchcom in 2008. Symmetry CONNECT is an update and relaunch of the Touchcom product that was known as OneFacility, said Barnette.

Barnette said AMAG took the prodcut back from the market for a while “to think about what customers really need as a solution and we've honed it down to visitor management, and credential authentication and compliance for auditing purposes,” Barnette said.

While there are many visitor management products, "very few do enterprise-wide visitor management .... we can scale up very easily," he said.

AMAG "made significant changes to the [visitor management] piece of code" in the Touchcom product. The credential authentication and compliance module in the product has been updated over the past few years. AMAG will be showing Symmetry CONNECT at ASIS.

The hosted solution can be operational within a day, the company said. "We have the ability to host it ourselves or if [customers] have their own data center they can host it," Barnette said.

The product will be important in AMAG's ongoing Casi Rusco initiative, he said. A few years ago, UTC (parent company of Casi Rusco) announced that it would end-of-life its Secure Perfect and Picture Perfect solutions and would transition those customers to a product called Facility Commander. AMAG considers this change in UTC's roadmap as an opportunity to get those UTC (Casi Rusco) customers to instead transition to AMAG. Barnette said many Casi customers have "big complex systems but they don't want to buy a PSIM [or complex credential authentication system]," he said. Symmetry CONNECT can help these customers, he said.