Edge360 to lead integration of PSIM solution for State Dept.

ASHBURN, Va.—Edge360, a global integrator of security technologies, will lead the development, integration and worldwide rollout of a Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) system in support of the State Department's worldwide upgrade as part of a recently awarded $73 million contract.

Edge360 will support prime contractor, Communications Resource, Inc. (CRI), by providing subject matter expertise in the development, integration and installation of the platform that includes geo-spatial awareness, 3-D modeling, video surveillance, access control, intrusion detection systems and other sensitive capabilities.

This real-time solution will provide the State Department with actionable information for immediate reaction and response to high-level threats in critical locations around the globe. The PSIM system will enable the Department of State to realize organizational efficiencies and improved security posture through increased awareness, and allow for reduced response time, improved situation awareness, and enhanced event monitoring and reporting.

John Rezzonico, Edge360 CEO, said that this project is exciting because it not only allows him to support the needs of the Department of State, but also to showcase the many solutions Edge360 can provide as both an integrator and product development company.

“We are an integration house, but we are very steeped in development, with many of us coming from the military intelligence field,” Rezzonico told Security Systems News.  “We are primarily an integrator but our main focus for our customer base is delivering what we like to call operationally appropriate solutions. We focus on delivering the military lifecycle of intelligence when it comes to technology into municipalities and into places that generally don't have that type of technology.”

Providing these solutions requires some ingenuity, Rezzonico said, including the in-house development of products in response to the specific needs he is seeing from clients.

“One of our focuses for 2017 is on our core product line, so we have our safe city camera manufacturing, our Slingshot product, which is our data fusion engine, and then we have Catapult, which is our edge and cloud VMS,” he explained. “We do have a desire to deliver these solutions to the integration houses as well. We built products that are designed to be in the hands of integrators to put their flavor on them, like a PSIM, and deliver them to the client.”

For example, Edge360 is working with the city of Atlanta to create a better safe city and now has a wireless network of deployed safe city cameras. “We have over 250 cameras and other than having one or two shot and one or two hit by trucks, we have had no regular failures—none. We built them to survive and we built them based on the fact that 10 years prior we were deploying the same types of systems in a combat environment, so we know where to invest the money in the top quality products.”

It is projects such as these that illustrate how far the company has come since it began six years ago.

“When Edge360 started we were a bootstrap company, but we have never taken on any investment or cash from anyone, and we have been in the black from day one,” said Rezzonico, who pointed out that the company will finish this year at $17 million in total revenue, after ending 2015 at $7 million. “We are looking to do $25 to $28 million in 2017.”

Although state and local is the company's “core focus and our core customers,” Rezzonico said that Edge360 did extend more into federal this year. “We made a large hire this year of a senior level Army official who worked out of the Pentagon, and his task is to lead Edge360's federal practice going forward in 2017. Our goal by the end of 2017, and we already have federal contracts, is to be established more as a 'prime' directly into the DoD as our main target, focused on the intelligence community.”

Rezznonico said returning to where he first began is very exciting for him and the company.