AMAG's newly promoted president shares plans for 2017

AMAG Technology, Inc., a G4S company headquartered in Torrance, Calif., announced this week that Kurt Takahashi, senior vice president, sales, has been promoted to president.

Takahashi, who began at AMAG in February 2015, successfully grew the business through his management of the sales, sales engineering and business development teams.

Prior to AMAG, Takahashi was the vice president of global sales and marketing at Quantum Secure, helping increase the global pipeline and revenue growth.

Takahashi told Security Systems News that he looks forward to helping AMAG Technology sustain the strong 20 percent year-over-year growth the company experienced from 2015 to 2016.

“We had a great year and part of the reason why we have had good growth is because the industry is now starting to understand that AMAG is more than just an access control company,” he explained. “That message is really starting to resonate, because if you look at the growth of the company, we grew in every category of our business.”

Last year, AMAG released its Symmetry product line with Symmetry GUEST, the company's web-based visitor management system, and Takahashi said he will continue to focus on delivering unified solutions that will help end users mitigate risk, meet compliance requirements and reduce costs.

“Our visitor management solution, which is a hosted service, is more than just a basic visitor management system—it is a policy-based system that has lots of full-featured integrations with third party products with calendaring systems,” he noted. “It automates how we manage different types of visitors, whether international visitors or different types of MBAs or safety certifications or acknowledgements, and things like that—really automating the experience of how companies actually manage their visitors.”

This year, the company is going to be releasing a rewrite of its Symmetry Connect platform. “We are looking forward to releasing that this year and that is going to help us to automate all of the onboarding and off-boarding and audits and compliance requirements for a lot of our customers.”

He pointed out that the success of these products can be attributed partly to the effort the company has put toward understanding the needs of its customers.

“We spend a lot of time sitting down with our customers in the command center next to the guard or the officer watching every click, asking, 'How do I simplify it?' These are the things that we are building into our application to simplify that process, whether it is through Connect or through new applications that we are building to augment things within Symmetry.”

He said that the company also gets a lot of great feedback and direction from customers at its annual AMAG Security Engineering Symposium. This year, the event is being held from Feb. 17-20 at the La Cantera Resort & Spa in San Antonio, Texas.

“That is really a big event for us that helps us determine if we are on track or if we need to make some adjustments,” he said. “We invite consultants, integrators and end users all to the same event and we feel that the collaboration of all three entities brings tremendous value to us in terms of how we define what features need to be changed within our application, what new types of technology or products need to be looked at, from either developing it ourselves or seeking out another third party to enhance their experience.”

In the spirit of new ideas, the company is releasing around mid-year 2017 a new Linux-based security panel called Crypto, which Takahashi said is “moving toward a much more nimble, flexible API that is incorporating more Web services, so it makes it easier for us to make updates and add new integrations with other third party companies,” he explained. “So it gives us more flexibility down the road and puts a lot more technology in the panel. We are looking at some good increases in that area for our business.”

He continued, “Overall, we are going to continue to look at the industry as a whole and see where we can enable new technology.”