The future of access?

I went on a road trip this past weekend. I've been on road trips before, down to the CSAA Fall Operations Management Seminar, down to G4S' Monitoring and Data Center, down to Viewpoint CRM, over to the Rapid Response Users' Group and last summer down to visit a whole bunch of security peeps in the Lonestar State.

This past weekend, I traveled down to Lynn, Mass. to check in on an ongoing deployment of FST21's SafeRise solution at a senior housing complex. It's not the first time I've been to Lynn... I visited Wayne Alarm and Ralph Sevinor's security industry museum back in 2008. It's also not the first time I've written about FST21. I first covered them when they came to the U.S. from Israel, and SSN covered them when Kent Security checked them out. I also wrote a blog post recently about ion247 monitoring the solution at a senior housing facility down south.

I met with them at ISC West, where they won product of the year in SIA's New Product Showcase. It was nice to sit down with the folks at FST21, the folks at Ocean Shores Apartments, the folks at DCRM (I'm pictured above with DCRM president Tina Simolaris), which worked in a consulting capacity with property management (with whom I aslo met). I also met, via conference call, with the folks from ion247, a monitoring center that's monitoring the SafeRise solution, and with the folks from Chubb who did the integration of the smart building system.

Dave Dearborn of consultants DCRM hosted the meeting and brought all the players together at Ocean Shores for a sit down discussion and demonstrations of the solution in action. Tune back in to SSN Videos in the coming days for a video of that visit.

One thing everyone agreed on was that this project exemplified where the future of security/access/surveillance might be headed. Solutions are becomming more complex conglomerations of what used to be disparate systems. It's all about offering more services, more uses for the infrastructure than just video or just intrusion or just mass notification or just access. It was a neat visit.

I'll provide more coverage of this and other FST21 projects going forward.