Standards bodies making progress

YARMOUTH, Maine—The security industry bodies that have stepped forward to advocate for a standardized future for physical security have all made moves and issued press releases recently that tout progress being made. SIA, PSIA and ONVIF all say that in the short time since ISC West, more and more compliant products have been released and have been demonstrated to work seamlessly together.

At ISC West, PSIA hosted a number of "successful demonstrations of interoperable products from Honeywell, UTC, Tyco, Hikvision, Arecont Vision, IQinVision and ObjectVideo," according to a press release. Further, the release states "the access control and intrusion market not only showed the ease of implementing products to the PSIA's Area Control specification, but plan commercial products relying on this spec in 2012."

“The PSIA systems suite of specifications is what the industry wants and needs," Ray Bernard, a specifier and consultant in risk/security management who has been spotlighted in Security Systems News' Specifically Speaking column said in a PSIA release. "Providing interoperability between all parts of the physical security system will save customers a considerable amount of money and reduce the time and frustration that often accompanies product integration.”

ONVIF was also on the scene at ISC West with interoperability demonstrations. For the AXIS-led group, this was the fourth public interoperability demonstration of ONVIF-conformant products, according to the group. The event, held on April 7, “brought together nearly 250 manufacturers, systems integrators, end users and others in the industry to demonstrate how ONVIF simplifies the process of building a network surveillance system using products from different vendors," according to statement from the group.

Axis Communications business development manager Jonas Andersson, who is chairman of ONVIF's Steering Committee, agreed there was much left to do in 2011 and beyond.

"In 2011, we'll be expanding the scope of our global specification to include physical access control products, which will open up a traditionally proprietary segment of the market to new possibilities in access control for end users, integrators and also to small, innovative firms in the access control market," Andersson said. "End users and integrators today have more than 800 ONVIF-conformant, commercially available products to choose from."

SIA, which announced at ISC West that Brivo president Steve Van Till would head the association's Standards Committee as chairman, also has plans to help pave the way to a standardized future.

"Since ISC West, the SIA Standards Committee has focused on re-drafting a new roadmap, focusing on complementarities between SIA standards and other industry standards that have already been developed. We rolled out a draft of our new roadmap last week at our first committee meetings since ISC West, and expect to publish a final version by mid-summer," Van Till told Security Systems News. "We don't think that reinventing the wheel serves anyone's interests, but there are still many areas that need standards and have not yet been addressed. We think that harmonizing any new standards development with existing standards is important for the industry."

SSN took an in-depth look at standards progress earlier in 2011 in an IP technology white paper.