 Hey, welcome back to the think tech Hawaii studios for another episode of security matters Hawaii today We have Kevin Wilhelm with us from signet electronic systems And we're going to be giving a voice to the integrator today who gets the bulk of the work out there Kevin, thanks for joining us today. I appreciate it Thanks for having me Andrew right on. I hope you're not driving Awesome, okay. Good deal. I tell you what let's start off with Maybe just give our viewers a little history. You're much as you care to share, you know about your background in the industry Absolutely, so I came into the industry about 10 years ago Primarily doing, you know small fire alarm systems, you know a little intrusion system Vista with demco panels stuff like that time went on I moved up and now I do design and engineering for a lot of high-rises in the Boston area As well as a number of k through 12 environments as well Wow, so the the high-rise environment has been interesting Did you did you start there because of the firework that you did previously? Yeah, absolutely. You know every high-rise is required. I have a very complex fire alarm system And we were very familiar with doing those we had a lot of contacts on the property management side And you know they start putting these turn styles and these really high-end elevator systems and all sorts of stuff like that And they come to us and say hey, you know is that something that you guys can do? And initially we just kind of said yeah, and it's turned out to be a really good market for us Wow, and is um The so what we've seen in hawaii is as a lot of video in that market But not a lot of access control and not a lot of integration to elevators So in the east coast is um, how's that market progressing with like some of the newer technologies? Yeah, I mean, we're actually we're seeing a lot of integration to the elevators. Um, so it's a term called elevator destination dispatch Yeah, um, it's a system provided by you know Otis and Schindler and people like that What we're doing is we're taking our standard credentials and then also a qr code barcode readers And integrating them into both the access control and then also the elevator destination dispatch So you walk up to a turnstile You present your credential whether it's a temporary qr barcode or more traditional access code Um turnstile opens up it says hey, you know go to bay three Because bay three is going to go to your elevator right on time and everything on there and is all managed But it's not relays anymore. That's really the cool part. It's all being done over, you know, ip communication It's not ones and zeros, you know the traditional relay sense It's real data strings with actual information and you know credential information Right on have um, so we did we've done a few of those here Did you get any pushback at all from the hj for being tied to the elevator controller? Like in other words if the now now, you know that security server if it has a comms issue that tends to put that elevator into a Uh, maybe a degraded mode of operation Have you seen any any uh that kind of stuff where it maybe it drives the elevator to the ground floor or something Where you know before access control systems didn't really Um impinge upon elevator operations Um, luckily not a ton yet. I mean, certainly we experience that all the time in the fire alarm side, but um for the elevator Destination dispatch. I haven't seen that quite yet Um, typically they're running a full, you know elevator system on their end and we're just giving them the data string Um, and then for fail-safe purposes the security desk usually has some more A call traditional physical commands for elevator control. Awesome. Awesome. That sounds nice So is uh, what do you think the the the greatest challenge has been in those environments? I mean here it seems to be The user sort of training. Um, but what what have you seen there? How's how's it been accepted by the users? You know, I would agree with you 100% you know, um, the staff that's typically Managing these systems at a front end location. Um, they're not professional IT staff. They're usually Part time security guards sometimes even contracted out So the coordination between the owner of the building The tenants in all these different spaces and then the the third party that's actually doing the security onsite has been Challenging at times because we have no control and the owner even to a certain extent doesn't have a ton of control over who The security guard is at the desk So, you know, if there are shuffling people around from their standpoint It's training all sorts of different people and when you're doing these visitor badges, you can become quite a challenge Wow, interesting. So what sort of penetration do you think you've achieved? Let's just say in I'm presuming you work in like downtown boston, but um with destination dispatch It's very new Um, it's not like a new york city where you see it all over the place. There's a few locations that have it But certainly every new high rise I see going up which in boston is quite a few of them All of them are going to elevator destination dispatch and integration into access control And that you know higher level software level That's awesome. Yeah, it's um Here's it's kind of a retrofit market And so it's I think it's they kind of wait for that elevator system to run its life span and get their their usage out of it But they are on the replacements. There's definitely, you know, I'd say I have eight ten percent maybe sort of market penetration of destination dispatch and are in our office buildings Um, not so much in the hotels and things like that yet Um, so go ahead Yeah, no, um, boston's a very hot market right now for new, you know, high rise buildings Um, there's an area we do very well. Um, and it's called the boston seaport And if you look at pictures of it from 20 years ago, it was a big parking lot Um, now every building down there is 10 15 plus stories and we're just seeing tremendous growth in that area in particular Wow, that's awesome. Um, is it are you seeing that that also that technological sort of change in the condominium market? Do you have a lot of high rise condominiums in town? Um, not so much an elevator destination dispatch, but they're the high end condos I definitely want the wiz bang stuff, you know, they don't want just an access control credential It's got to be on the phone All the cameras they want to have different types of analytics, you know, they want really high end stuff And it's very cool. Once again, you know, you're taking a traditional access control output And then they want to tie it to their lighting system in the room They want to tie it to the hpc and do all this really cool integrations between systems Nice. Um, what about um lpr? Are you seeing a license plate recognition used to allow people into the gate? I've definitely started to see that happen on um The residential, you know properties like condominiums and stuff in hanah lulu. I don't know if that's popular up there or not Absolutely We're seeing it both on the condominiums and then also in the the office space So a lot of our offices will typically have um a garage built into the lower levels of it So same type of idea, you know, uh, so we're we're a genitech dealer And genitech does a really nice job integrating their access control as a part of their their single centralized software okay, um and in your um Other markets, so are Are these typically mixed use sort of facilities or is there retail and other types of of of uh, Operations inside these buildings or they typically just straight. Um, you know, like office towers It varies a little bit. Um, every project's a little different There are some, you know, depending on the height sometimes they'll mix and have a hotel for a few levels condos for a few levels in office for a few levels Um, so we see all the above, you know, we do see some still dedicated, you know, pure residential systems But a lot of them are residential on the upper levels and the ground floor is going to be You know restaurants and some other sort of retail like that Interesting. Yeah, I Boston is one city. I've never been to so I'm gonna have to get up there and check it out It sounds like it sounds like you guys are working sort of at the the leading edge So give us a feel for the size of your office. Do you have uh, your your solutions architect yourself? So you're sort of the pre-sale engineering post-sale engineering or how do you guys work the market there? Both, um, so I do pre and post sales Um, I primarily work with all call them higher end end users You know, I'm not really working with seven elevens. I think that has been around since the 1970s We have about 150 employees 55 of those are technicians. We're exclusively in the new england area. We're we're based just south of boston Um, so we really play strongly in, you know, the red island Boston and up to new hampshire and main market Hmm interesting. Do you have um, do you guys have a federal group as well? Yep, we are on the gsa And we do a lot of work with different federal agencies So we're we're gsa. I apologize to forget the number of the schedule Yeah, we're on the gsa and have done federal agencies in the the boston area in the boston area Okay, I didn't know how I didn't know if a lot of the a lot of firms your size are kind of spread out So you guys work just from one central headquarters We do have a small satellite office in red island in main, but uh, new england's not a very big geographical area So 90 of our work is, you know, massachusetts near boston then red island, okay um, so Outside of the high rises. What uh, what other markets do you work in? We do a lot in k-312. Oh, it's awesome. Okay. Oh, yeah We're seeing a lot of schools and you know, they're transitioning to You know tying their access control into what I'll call critical communications So, you know, it's having a panic event and not just doing a lockdown but also providing information You know to to give people the ability to respond appropriately What um, and so how is the penetration there? So are you familiar with the nsca like that? P. A. S. S. Program I think it's a partner alliance for safer schools or what sort of guidance Do you see boston? I'm presuming you're meaning like municipal government schools or a lot of they private on them I'm not sure how it works up there, but what what sort of guidance do you guys see amusing? I'm sorry Okay, and is it do they have uh, do they have some standards that they're sort of trying to drive towards achieving? I know that the partner alliance for safer schools has sort of like four tiers of Of build out, you know, so that a school can kind of wrap its mind around, you know Where it wants to get to are you seeing just wholesale forklift come in bring us the good stuff In the boston area, it's it's been a lot of, you know, totally new construction Which for my standpoint is great, you know, you're talking, you know, 200 million dollar high schools all over the place It's it's a really good market You know, so a lot of that's once again being architect driven But the state does has a have a set of guidelines And then it's working with architects and engineers to educate them in the latest technologies and ways to meet those guidelines We're also talking to superintendents as well and making sure everyone's kind of on board with it Wow So is that a bid market for you guys or are you sort of the like the industry leader in that in that k-12 space up there? Or how's that? How does the market work? So we do have a state contract and you know, some purchases are able to be made off the state contract Typically for new construction though, which is, you know, the large bulk of the k-12 That's all all through public bid market Awesome And it is so you had you mentioned a couple of different markets So are those do you work like vertical market specific or do you tend to also work on other projects outside of just just schools and high rises? Yeah, I work on, you know, other projects outside of that. Um, I've actually uh, just left a a high rate customer Um, which is a totally different, you know Set of needs in a k-12 and you're talking about a real open camp And then we also deal with, you know, private corporations as well, not just high rises You know, we have multiple sites and working with them from a consultative perspective on those remote sites Awesome. And so do you have a team that um, that you, you know, you guys work in teams or you just get Projects come in and you guys will assign people to projects as they as they roll along There's about four or five sales reps I work with on the the pre-sale side And then about four or five project managers I work with on the post-sale side Um, really good team. Everyone's been in the industry for a long time now Um, you know, very very very lucky to be working on the group that I am Awesome Okay, well, we're going to take a short break here and pay a few bills. We'll be back in about one minute with kevin wilhelm Hi, i'm rusty kamori host of beyond the lines on think tech hawaii My show is based on my book also titled beyond the lines and it's about creating a superior culture of excellence leadership and finding greatness I interview guests who are successful in business sports and life Which is sure to inspire you in finding your greatness Join me every monday as we go beyond the lines at 11 a.m. Aloha Hey stand the energy man here on think tech hawaii And they won't let me do political commentary. So i'm stuck doing energy stuff But I really like energy stuff. So i'm going to keep on doing it So join me every friday on stand the energy man at lunchtime at noon on my lunch hour We're going to talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen We're going to definitely be talking about it We'll talk about how we can make hawaii cleaner how we can make the world a better place Just basically save the planet even miss america can't even talk about stuff like that anymore We got it nailed down here. So we'll see you on friday at noon with stand the energy man. Aloha Hey, welcome back to security matters hawaii. This is andre the security guy and we're talking with kevin wilhelm from sygnet electronic systems out of boston Um, this is our voice of the integrator series. So uh kevin What uh, what are you trying to push out into that market that's not there? Uh, you know, it's not quite there yet, but every time I turn around it's getting a little better is bluetooth credentials You know, I'll call mobile credentials is a general term You know the cost is I think where it needs to be the technologies I think where it needs to be it's just getting people used to having You know a different way to get in the building feeling comfortable that it's a secure technology But I I think that's something that's going to take off sooner than later It's they've come a long ways with it, especially the manager the credentials You know every time I turn around they have a slightly revised way to do it But they've been really improving and putting a lot of time and effort into it Yeah, so do you think we'll get that? I mean the college campus has seemed like the right place to go play with that Um, I think also high rises as well. Where do you think we'll see that start to move the most or the quickest? I think you kind of nailed it. Um, you know where we've done implementations already have been in in higher red And you know, it's having these conversations with you know, private corporations as well Places are moving a little bit towards bring your own device, but everyone's expected to have the cell phone at work pretty much You know, I think that's pretty standard at this point Um, you know, and it's telling people. Oh, it makes it a lot easier to manage That's the key. You don't have to try to get a credential back It's just a single interface. Here's the active in again Wow And are you guys playing with different types of technologies or like just linel or just asa or what's your uh What's your labor? What's your favorite flavor? I guess My favorite. Oh, that's a tough. That's a loaded question. Okay, you don't have to answer a lot of different products Right on right on. Um, you know very familiar with h. I. D. You know and assa abley Um, we also work with freebo as well who has a uh, mobile credential solution Sure, um, and then also farpoint and um, a few others as well, you know, we're pretty open Um, and you know, anyone who's willing to work with us and give us good support We're more than happy to work. Awesome. Yeah, so you you touched on a few things. They're so brief. Oh, and we're actually These credentials you're talking about we're able to move, you know, use the cloud What do you think about cloud adoption in our industry? I love it. Um, I think the time is right You know, especially if you're someone who's not pushing, you know, more than a hundred cameras, but You know, you talk about some of these smart codecs the cameras have now and even You know two five megapixel cameras aren't pushing a ton of bandwidth When you talk about the cloud the thing that I really like about it is it staff is typically decreasing We're not seeing a lot of people investing in hiring more it staff So anything you can take off their plate and especially when you talk about patches and and even minor upgrades and stuff like that Moving to the cloud. It's just more reliable and more secure Yeah, I 100% agree. I um, I I love it that videos finally getting there. Um, have you guys Seen larger scale deployments into the cloud or more like hybrid models where people are storing, you know Maybe a week or two on site and then pushing, you know, the other, you know, what is it? 75 days, you know up to the cloud So we've seen it both ways where you're storing, you know A certain amount of period on site that he's in the cloud for additional storage Um, but also we've worked with a couple of products that are entirely cloud hosted So the only thing you have on site is a camera. No, not even a gateway or anything like that It's just a camera camera specific firmware on it. You license it as is appropriate and you're off and running And Depending on the environment, we've been able to get those up to a pretty good scale. Yeah, that's awesome I um, we've been playing with some of those and I'm finding them quite successful um, what about some of the the stuff we're seeing out of intel with New machine learning and and you know being able to move that processing power either onto the camera or onto the vms Or into the cloud Do you think we're going to see more adoption of you know machine learning and deeper learning algorithms in those camera streams? Absolutely, I mean we talked a little bit earlier about license plate recognition as a credential um And one of the ways to make that better Is by doing this machine learning and deep learning and um, I believe a number of manufacturers have actually Invested or worked with intel try to bring that technology in the lpr Anytime you're talking about, you know the unusual motion detection Character recognition all those things are going to be improved by ai Yeah, I I sat in a symposium down with the intel folks a couple weeks ago down in san diego and it was Amazing to me Where they're looking, you know, we haven't had intel necessarily way into our industry very much You know, we just sort of been chassis driven But they're really starting to pay attention to the sort of the architecture of our systems and looking at how they can build How they can take the chip technologies that they have and and put them in our ecosystem in a place where they make the most sense Are you seeing multiple types of machine learning Tools applied this it's like a stream of video or are you seeing more a single type application applied to multiple streams Uh, usually it's more of a single type application applied to multiple streams at this point time. Um The issue has been I mean and That you can't do it on the edge, you know in environments where I've been able to do analytics on the edge You get a lot more flexibility when you're building out, you know a dedicated head end server It becomes more selective On what you're trying to offer in terms of analytics You're really trying to nail it down with a customer on what they really want to do just because there's such a high cost to it You know, these are very processor intensive activities and sometimes you're using specialized GPUs, but It's uh, it's a large forklift upgrade And it's important to get the customer to figure out what they really want to do as opposed to just some flash Yeah, have have you seen um, or did you work with the police force up there by any chance? Uh, not in the city of Boston. We do do work with quite a few policemen. Oh awesome Yeah, so the I'm interested in in where they're going to go with some of this body worn cam And you know, I don't think we'll have an analytic necessarily in that body cam But perhaps the the streaming video could be processed through some machine learning Uh to help identify behavior. I saw an interesting one that showed a face Thermal and you know, it was actually Determining the intention of the person based on where the blood was flowing in their head And and I was thinking like they'd be nice to know You know, if somebody's getting ready to attack you or whatever it might be, you know, or a crowd How angry are they? I don't I don't know where this is all going to go But I'm interested to see the development of machine learning and surveillance It seems to me that that's been the greatest advance in our industry in the last 24 months Um, how do you think, you know, the surveillance advances compare with, you know, integrating access control and using bluetooth credentials? Um, you know, as far as share in the market space But you know, some of the real high end ones I've only seen for You know, we've just requested for it And you know worked on them, but um in terms of large scale installation usually it starts with I want to do it for 150 cameras and then they end up doing it on two or three And once again, a lot of that is because of you know, the server processing power needed If there's the ability to do it on the edge or in the cloud, which I think is in the near future I think that's we're going to start to see really widespread adoption of it Yeah, I hope it I think it's Going to move our industry further it it seems from from my perspective and you've been at it, you know, 20 years or so the um We're finally able to do things that we talked about, you know, five years ago And it seems like that window of delivery is getting smaller and smaller. So maybe You know, I don't know from what your perspective is, but it seems like things we're talking about today I'll probably be able to deliver maybe in 18 24 months. It's getting quicker and quicker to delivery Absolutely And the key thing is it from an integrated perspective Is educating people after we provide it, right, you know, all these analytics are great But the user experience and making sure they understand the limitations of it the abilities of it That's that's a big part of this Yeah, how um, do you guys go to market for your users? Do you put on, you know, little trade fairs or do you just is it more education? You know in their space or um, what's your sort of market approach for a signet? Kind of all the above. Um, I think we do a very good job of creating marketing materials, you know, internally We have a blog that we keep pretty well updated. Okay. We're active in various trade fairs Um, you know, we're competitive in the big market and we're also very good At cross-telling. So I said that I do fire alarm We have a very large nurse call division and we've done a great job of saying, yeah You know, you're familiar with our nurse call for me on my telephone And going and talking about, you know, the kind of high end quality work can do on the security end as well Yeah, are your so do you do security work in hospitals as well? Yes Um hospitals are a little trickier because you're not seeing a ton of new hospitals being built There's always some sort of existing infrastructure you have to try to figure out and work with Um, but yet we do work in in higher education health care. Um, all the above Yeah, the health care space has been hot out here because of the opioid problems. We have about 19 pharmacies that all really, um Did sort of a major upgrade for sort of a limiting access to the storage Um of those opioids Um, and I don't know if that's a is that a trend you guys are seeing up there in the in the pharmacies inside the hospitals A much higher level of security being applied We've seen more cameras put in the pharmacy level than other areas We so messachusetts has some cannabis that's legal Okay, we've seen a lot of regulatory requirements for cannabis creation storage and production So that's been a good market. Um, the department of health is very particular On what they want in terms of camera coverage and camera storage That's been a very nice market for us because once again, it's highly regulated So they're required to have a camera system and they want it to work well because it doesn't They could have issues being shut down by the state. Hmm. I see. Yeah, that's been a new one here We have only the medical marijuana outlets um Are your folks end to end like here they grow they they grow they ship They package and sell they have to own the entire process. Is that a similar thing to massachusetts? Yep, so they can have um, i'll call them store friends as well But uh, yes, you know, they have the manufacturing so they have the growing out back They have the labs. They have the processing and they have the shipping. Wow. Yeah, it's it's involved. That's um, Hawaii got has it been a big market there for many years or is it just how old is that market? I guess in the east Uh, two and a half to three years, you know, it's very very recent You know, it was entirely the legislation changing and granting licenses And then the expectation that you know full legalization is sooner than later. Wow Yeah, that's how hawaii is going down that path quite interesting. Um, we have different Like they don't view it as a like HIPAA health health care Regulation it seems to be more Like it's its own cottage industry In the way that the they defined the security would be done There's like no windows and things like that. Is it do you have a special set of guidance for those facilities? Oh, yeah, absolutely. You know, it's very different than a hospital and environment It's entirely on its own and their design is their design Wow, awesome. Well, Kevin, um, any final thoughts? We got a couple minutes left here You know, I mean one thing I do want to talk about is the ability and the growth of systems to scale across multiple sites You know, we talked about I mean all these awesome features And the cool thing is is, you know, you can scale that across a large environment. So if you have 50 buildings The internet is the point now where you can, you know, distribute systems throughout them and have a single centralized security command and I mentioned that experience is part of the challenge 50 security guards out of the field and centralizing them to a professional controlled environment You know, I think we're going to see a lot of good results from that once you can have a real professional dedicated, you know, physical security staff Is going to bring very good results Awesome. Well, thank you so much for spending your time and your thoughts with us today Because security matters. Aloha Thank you, Heather