Denis Hébert named president of Feenics

OTTAWA—Denis Hébert, current chairman of the board of SIA, and the former CEO of HID Global, today was named president of Feenics, a cloud-based access control manufacturer.

“Feenics takes a cloud-based approach to access control. I believe that's where the future lies,” Hébert told Security Systems News.

“The cloud model is the ideal approach,” he said. Hébert said that Feenics “has a number of different characteristics that make it a much more attractive model.”

For example, it presents end users and integrators with the opportunity to move access control from a capital expense to an operating expense, he said. In addition,  “customers can have the system on-prem, or if they want it in the cloud, they can have it in the cloud,” Hébert said. Customers can migrate their Feenics system from on-premises to the cloud at any time, he said.

“If integrators wants to personalize [Keep, Feenics' flagship access control product] as their service, they can do that,” Hébert said. Feenics will manage the system “in the background” for integrators, he said.

Hébert is an equity partner in Feenics, as is EVP Paul DiPeso and CEO and founder Sam Shalaby.

Launched in 2014, Feenics was founded by Sam Shalaby, while he was building his systems integration business FSC. FSC was sold to Convergint in 2013.

Hébert served for 12 years as CEO and president of HID Global and EVP of Assa Abloy. Before that he was with Honeywell for 17 years.

Hébert worked with Feenics EVP Paul DiPeso at Honeywell. DiPeso told SSN that Hébert is a proven leader who “really understands the needs of VARs and end users. … He gets the voice-of-the-customer very, very well.”

DiPeso said Feenics' business has been steadily building, and received a boost from its partnership with Schneider Electric, which was announced at ISC West, and will officially launch in a few weeks. DiPeso said some larger enterprise customers have signed up as the result of that partnership. “The end users are leading the charge faster than the resellers,” he said.