Feenics: Led by industry vet, attracting integrators' attention

Have you heard of Feenics? It's a new cloud-based access control platform that's being run by an industry vet and that attracted the attention of some integrators who are demoing, or getting ready to install “Keep” which is Feenics' first product.

Paul DiPeso, who was most recently with Lenel, is running the show for Feenics as VP and GM, and this week he's at the Feenics' office in Ottawa conducting a “voice of the customer” meeting with some integrators, including Alpha Corp, GS Security, Contava, TRL Systems, Open Systems and Koorsen Security.

I had a chance to speak to Di Peso as well as Skip Sampson and Shannon Martindale from Koorsen, and I'll have a regular story on the whole Feenics offering next week.

Suffice it to say, Sampson and Martindale are excited about the offering. Sampson believes Keep will be an RMR generator for his company and a product that his customers will like.

Sampson installed Keep at the Koorsen office and tested it for six months. “We gave [developers] feedback and they were quick to acknowledge and implement [some changes],” he said.

He's sold two systems and “has quite a few in the pipeline,” he said. Asked about hosted and managed services, Sampson said he's dabbled in hosted video, but he believes that managed access control is "the most viable managed service. You don't need a huge pipe, huge SAN or attached storage, a DSL works just great,” he said.

And with Keep, which works with standard Mercury panels “there's comfort that if the customer for some reason doesn't like it, you can put in something else without replacing the infrastructure. I think Sam was wise in doing that. We play on that point.”

Sam is Sam Shalaby, former owner of FSC, who developed the product. Shalaby is still 100 percent owner of Feenics and sits on the board of advisors, but he is not involved in the day-to-day business.

Sampson acknowledged that there are “multiple other products that do similar things, but what's different with Sam's is that he didn't take a product that's been out there for 10 to 15 years and take the same GUI, and same layout and try to make it work as a hosted product. He started to build it with an integrator's mindset. It's not an access control panel-centric product.”

Sampson called it “fresh and new and relevant,” and said it has “kind of a Google look to it.”

Working with DiPeso are Dave Charles who does business development, Ralph Shillington who is CTO and who developed the original software, and Anthony Shalaby who is running logistics.

Check back next week, for more details on Feenics' and DiPeso's go-to-market strategy.