New Viscount CEO Sieracki looks to commercial market

VANCOUVER, British Columbia—Scott Sieracki, newly named CEO of access control provider Viscount, believes the company offers an economical alternative to traditional access control and also addresses current cybersecurity concerns.

With back-office infrastructure shored up and significant federal government contracts underway, Sieracki told Security Systems News that the company is poised to “break out into the commercial space and continue expanding into the federal government space.”

“We are the next technology in access control,” Sieracki said. “We're going to do for access control what VoIP did for telephony and IP did for video,” he predicted.

Sieracki replaces Dennis Raefield who resigned for personal reason. Raefield, who joined Viscount in 2012, will continue to be an “active advisor” and will serve on the board of directors. Sieracki joined Viscount in December. Previously, he worked for IDV Solutions, Quantum Secure and Software House. He was also president and co-founder of Open Options, a provider of open architecture-based access control systems.

Customers are interested in the cybersecurity benefits of Viscount's unique “panel-less” architecture, Sieracki said. “We encrypt the data and move the data back to where cybersecurity can protect it,” he said. “It's a new topology. The data is where you want it to be and it's 25- to 50 percent less expensive than card readers or door [hardware and software.]”

Viscount's Freedom Encryption Bridge access control product uses a “bridge” at the door. The access control software resides on the end user's server, behind a company's firewall. This was an important selling point for the U.S. Department of Citizenship and Immigration and other federal government end users such as the Veterans Administration, Sieracki

The product is compliant with government regulations such as HSPD-12, FIPS 201 and FICAM 1302.

Sieracki said Viscount's revenue is up this year and “our pipeline is five- to six times what it was in 2014. … now we're starting to grab momentum in the commercial business [particularly with] large multinationals and in the college and university space.”

Viscount will be showing a new integration feature and functionality at the ASIS show in September.

His goal is to get the word out to integrators and end users that physical access control systems “can coexist with what CISOs expect [in terms of] protecting their facility and their network.”