The industry adapts to the new times

By Julián Arcila R.

Arguably the two most important security exhibitions (fairs) for Latino audiences in the United States are ISC West, in Las Vegas, and ASIS, which changes venues every year. In 2009, this last fair, which specializes in offering security for corporate security chiefs, traveled to Anaheim, California, and as usual SECURITY SALES was touring the halls of the show.

For the sake of truth it is fair to say that the market is already quite oriented towards the IP trend, so much so that there is already talk of cameras in high definition, a large number of megapixels and the most sophisticated compression methods. There is also increasing progress in self-sufficient embedded systems, which do not depend, at all, on a remote storage system.

For the rest, everything remains the same, except for the numbers of most of the companies in the sector that unfortunately were quite affected by the crisis. Those that best navigated it managed to stay at an equilibrium point, even though the delay of projects was a constant during the last year.

Review of the economy
SECURITY SALES was able to talk to some companies that offered their vision on what happened in 2009 for the sector. It seems that the weather is now positive and allows you to breathe a little calmer, since some projects have resumed their course.

One of the companies that expressed its satisfaction with the re-establishment of the works was Milestone, the renowned Danish software developer, a company that through Manuel Nylen and Juan Carlos George, responsible for the Latin American market, commented that although the year did leave the halt in the execution of several projects, for this company this did not mean the loss of projects; before, they say, the corporation will report above-average growth in the industry.

In a similar way, Liliana Torres, ge Security's marketing manager for Latin America, said that in general terms they report a positive balance despite external pressures. "We had a complicated first semester, but we think for all the actors it was like that. This second semester looks very good and the general perception is that the crisis is receding so there is a greater propensity to invest and to reactivate the projects that were stopped in the first months of the year, "he said.

He added that what was most affected during the first months of the year were private sector investments. "The governments, in order to promote the economy, were a strong part and will remain so for the next few years in sectors such as energy, hydrocarbons, transport, citizen security and others," he said.

The crisis did not stop the launches
But in contrast to what you might think in lean times, companies in the sector did not stop investments in research and development, as many of the firms we spoke to presented developments to meet the new needs of the market.

One of those companies that presented new solutions was Sanyo, who proudly and before the press showed the line of high definition cameras. It is worth saying that this company has traditionally been recognized for its offer to the mass consumption market, but they have been in the electronic security segment for 40 years.

We spoke about this new product with José Reina, sales and technical support manager for Mexico and North America. The executive commented that "At Asis we are presenting nine HD solutions. Two are PTZ, the others are Box Cameras. One of them has the integrated lens and will replace the DCCHD4000, which is the one we introduced two years ago, with excellent results of acceptance by the market. The reason for this is that it has HDMI output, which allows the guard to see an image on a high-definition screen."

New markets, new applications
One of the elements observed in ASIS 2009 was the responsiveness of companies, which is reflected in the development of new products to meet the needs of new markets.

For example, Optelecom – nkf, was presenting the Traffic Server, a solution that aims to meet, with cameras, the needs of the transport sector, offering video intelligence to generate actions that reduce risks. As this magazine stated in its first editions, CCTV systems, more than just observers, are becoming an active part of decision-making.

The solution, which won the ASIS 2009 Technological Innovation Award, is an extreme temperature encoder that included intelligence for incident detection; it allows to detect incidents in highways, tunnels or bridges so that corrective actions can be taken more quickly. Yossman Infante, the company's systems engineer, said: "We were awarded the award because this product is a robust and decentralized intelligence solution. Nowadays many companies offer video analysis solutions and do it in a centralized way: they have a single server that does the analysis but this is vulnerable to failures and if the server fails all the intelligence of the system is lost. In our case, the device that is next to the camera is the thinking being and if it fails you have other cameras and other devices that continue to do the system analysis."

Similarly, GE presented a new line of solutions for both the fire and video industries. In the first the firm but did not have a product for the needs in medium and small projects, but in 2009 they presented two panels, the small analogue that has two versions, the most economical with a family of new detectors known as Vigilant, and the IO version, which is the version for Edwards certified partners, which handles the Signature family of detectors. These are panels of 64 and 250 points although the latter can be expanded to 500.

Overall, it can be seen that the industry seems to have entered a time of development of existing technologies rather than new revolutions. The IP world is the paradigm, but it is not yet very clear on how to get the most out of it that has been promised to it since its inception. It is also important to highlight the emergence of new markets, which offer the resources that have been lost in the High End segments. Technological accommodation is a good strategy.