Siemens preaches, practices at new HQ
BUFFALO GROVE, Ill.—Being part of a worldwide conglomerate has its advantages. For Siemens Building Technologies, it means having the resources to create a Customer Solutions Center and corporate office here that not only serves as a display hall for the company’s products, but also has been built and designed from the ground up to show off the company’s integration capabilities.
The building itself is LEEDs certified, for example, and produces zero actual garbage, showing Siemens’ internal commitment to green practices. Neil Pickrem, who runs the CSC, even noted that the building contains “no printed material.” When customers are brought in for a briefing, they are shown presentations on one of a dozen video screens, all of which are integrated into 14 PCs ( recycled from employee workstations) so that the same video and audio can be seen and heard on any screen at any time.
Further, there is a Barco display wall running Siemens’ SiteIQ video analytics-enabled video management system, which customers can play with, adjusting levels of security; watching vans, cars, and people walking to the smoking area trigger alarms; and manually operating PTZ cameras. There are also C-Pass control panels integrated with cameras, a Sygnal mass notification system integrated with the fire alarms, and gadgets like a Zigbee-wire-less thermostat you can stick just about anywhere that’s integrated into the HVAC system.
Carey Boethel, VP and head of the Security Solutions business unit, said having the facility helps sell building automation “at the right level ... If you have a security guy selling to a security guy, you’re not selling building automation,” he said. “You have to elevate the pitch within the organization.”
Is Siemens actually having success selling wholly integrated buildings, where the HVAC, building controls, security, and fire systems are all part of one system? Boethel said he’s seeing customers at the high and low ends of the size spectrum: “At the small end, you’ve got customers who can’t afford to have individuals in charge of all the different pieces – they’ve just got one guy for facilities and security, and that can be the path of least resistance.” And at the high end, there’s often a c-level position, he said, that sees the efficiencies that can be created. “It’s about vendor consolidation, a different value proposition,” he said. “It’s a much more complex and longer sale, but there are certainly companies that are doing it today.”
ASG grows Mid-Atlantic
By Martha Entwistle, managing editor
BELTSVILLE, Md.—ASG’s May
19 acquisition of Controlled
Access will expand video and access control capabilities in ASG’s Mid-
Founded in the early 1970s,
Controlled Access has been
around “since the early days of
integration,” Guagenti said. The
company developed a number of
all of i
company brings with it $33,000
in RMR and $5 to $6 million
in installation revenue. ASG
expects to quickly double the
amount of RMR with the combined resources of the two companies.
advantage of ASG’s fire and burg capabilities. Within the next 90 days, the Maple Grove office will merge with ASG’s nearby Turnerville, N.J., branch operation.
Atlantic region.
“It continues to set the stage for us where all of our branch operations
“It also builds density in the mid-
[have strong capa-bilities] in all the channels where we do business, including high-end commercial, government, small business, residential and fire,” said ASG CEO Joe Nuccio. The
Casey Guagenti
Atlantic region,” something ASG has been focused on in ts regions, noted Ralph
Nuccio called Casey Guagenti, president of Controlled Access, “one of the best sales guys around.” He and Nuccio are old friends, having worked together years ago at Security Link.
Masino, ASG CFO.
Controlled Access, a 30- employee shop based in Maple Grove, N.J., can now take
ASG see page 16
By L. Samuel Pfeifle, editor
VERNON HILLS, Ill.—CDW, through its CDW Government subsidiary, has launched a small physical security practice that is designing and building security systems, focusing initially in the education and government verticals.
“We’ve
been selling
Cindy Schwartz
IP cameras for years,” said Cindy Schwartz, CDW-G physical security specialist, “and we’ve seen a large success in order fulfillment with our customers, so we decided to create a practice dedicated to physical security. We’ve seen definite trends in the marketplace shifting from analog cameras to IP.”
Casinos and ConnectionsIT
With its legacy in the IT space, CDW-G typically brings in partners it has been working with in the past to do much of the installation work, Schwartz said. However, “we’re exploring different options of who’s out there and who would give us the best coverage.”
By L. Samuel Pfeifle, editor
Okla. The latter has roughly
SANTA ROSA, Calif.—It’s your classic IT story. “We started out in our garage quite a few years ago, building computers and working in the telecom space,” said Brody Carlson, president of ConnectionsIT. But this isn’t the Apple Computers story, and it isn’t your classic security integrator creation myth.
1,400 IP cameras, an installation ConnectionsIT is calling “the largest installation of IP cameras at any casino in the world.”
However, ConnectionsIT has leveraged its networking pedigree to become a player in the gaming vertical, in the last month completing IP surveillance systems for the Black Bart Casino in Mendicino County, Calif., and the Spirit River, in Tulsa,
Nor do industry commentators challenge this claim. A
query to Pelco resulted in an admission that, if you’re talking pure IP cameras, it’s larger than anything they know about. An Axis representative hedged his bets by saying, “ 1,400 is, if not the largest, definitely among the largest.”
new of petabytes of storage.
Carlson credits recent advances in camera and compression technology with opening up the casino market. Currently, surveillance is about 60 percent
of ConnectionsIT’s revenue, with much of the rest coming from managed IT services. The company has 40 employees and offices here, as well as in Nevada and
CDW-G is also trying to provide its partners with good data to get them more security work. It recently released its 2009 School Safety Index, for example, which surveyed more than 400 K- 12 IT and security directors. While much of the survey concerned IT security, CDW-G did find that 79 percent of schools are using video surveillance of some kind, and that’s up from 70 percent in 2008. Further, some 70 percent of schools are now using mass notification of some kind, up from just 45 percent in 2008.
Oklahoma. Carlson said he expects to open fices near the Great Lakes and in Southern California later this year. SSN
Brody Carlson
And those cameras create a lot of data. River Spirit sports 1. 4
Currently, there are just two dedicated security specialists in the physical security practice, but “we’re looking to grow that significantly over the next couple of years,” Schwartz said. SSN
New Insite office in CT
By L. Samuel Pfeifle, editor
William Whiteside, a former
GREENWICH, Conn.—Insite
Secret Service agent and Deputy
Security, a security and risk-management firm specializing in high-net-worth clients, has opened a second office here to better serve clients here and in surrounding communities like New
U.S. Marshal. He reports to
Insite owner and president Chris Falkenberg, also a former Secret Service agent.
that are now in every high-end home. “Every job we do comes with an AV consultant now,” he said, “which wasn’t the case five years ago.”
Caanan, Cornwall, and Stamford. According to CNNMoney.com,
Greenwich has a median income of nearly $150,000 and the average home is worth roughly $1.5 million.
Insite now has seven full-time employees, all of them former high-level police officers or federal security employees,
and the company designs risk-mitigation polices along with security systems, which are then contracted out to integrators for installation. Falkenberg feels a customer is “best served by having an independent party draft the specifications and then the rea
The new office is led by
“It’s certainly true that the types of crimes that the wealthy are victimized by increase in times of economic downturn,”
said Falkenberg about sons for his company’s growth. But he also credits the “low-voltage revolution,” and the AV integrated systems
Chris Falkenberg
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