 Hey everybody, it's another episode of Low Def Moment, a show where I talk to, my name is Ian Davidson, talk to a business owner, entrepreneur, et cetera, about their business, what they've got going on in their world, and possibly talk to them, hopefully, about how they use social media to better their business, et cetera. This week we have Andrew Lanning on the episode, co-founder of Integrated Security Technologies. How's it going, man? Good. Good to be here, man. Thanks for giving me a shout. No, no, no. You know what I mean? I like to talk. You know how I am. Yeah. No, this is really cool. Thanks for being on in this quick disclaimer. I do know Andrew through Think Tech Hawaii. We are paths across a bit, and he has a show on there called Hibachi Talk, so we might talk about that in a little bit. Let's talk about Integrated Security Technologies. What do you guys do? Sure. We are a electrical contracting firm, but we specialize in electronic security systems and system integration. We install all the pipe, cable, wiring, but then we also load all the applications and the database software, configure that test, and train the users on how to use their systems, and then of course we maintain those systems for them over the lifetime. We've been almost about 19 years in business. Wow. I took a look at your website, looked around what you guys do, and you talked about electronic security and biometrics and all of that kind of stuff. So you guys are doing biometrics? Yeah, biometrics have been a big part of the industry, primarily in the DOD space for many, many years, which is sort of where we started. But the price point has come down now where a lot of commercial entities are starting to add biometric functionality to their endpoints. Biometrics just lets you have that second or third form of authentication. We hear about 2FA in like an online account where you use a password, but then you might put in a PIN code like you do at an ATM, for example. So biometrics does the same thing for us at a door where someone may have presented a card, but hey, I also want to make sure that that's really them so I can do an iris scan or a fingerprint scan or whatever it may be and add that level of authentication to a facility entryway, for example. Is a facility used biometrics because the stuff that they are securing is more important or is it that the technology like not having that layer of security also added on top of say the password or the PIN code or the card swipe, are they doing that because those lesser, for lack of a better word, security systems aren't as good? Yeah, you know, there's a couple ways to look at it. The DOD tends to have some requirements like that around multiple forms of authentication, but as soon as you get outside of that space, a commercial entity probably didn't do biometrics because the price point for entry was kind of high. So they may have a card plus a PIN, which is something that you have and something that you know. So that way if an employee loses a card in the parking lot, a guy can't just walk up to the door and badge through the door, right? So if I have turned on two factor with card plus PIN, then I've got that additional level of assurance and that still is probably adds 100 or 150 bucks per door higher than just a standard card reader. But when I add a biometric, be it an iris scan or a fingerprint scan or these are now adding, used to be thousands of dollars per door, but now I'm adding several hundred more for each opening, so we're using that. So that's why the adoption of the commercial space has been a bit slower. But the adoption is there, it's happening. Yeah, the price point finally came down to where it's, you know, obviously if you say I use it up at my X perimeter doors, you know, once I've got people in my facility, I've authenticated them maybe two or three ways, so therefore I know they're okay. So then I could let them, I don't need it on every door, but so the idea is to put it on the perimeter and then use a lower level of authentication inside or maybe I've only got one area that's really needs a higher level of assurance before someone goes in there and maybe at that particular entryway I'll go ahead and use biometrics there where everywhere else I'm just maybe using card or card plus pin. So there's a couple of different ways to apply it depending on the size of facility and the level of risk that they can assume for the materials or personnel inside of their facility. What industries are coming to a business like yours looking for security? So data centers, financial centers, supply chain to DoD, we typically see it there. Our hospitals, we tend to use a two factor kind of card plus pin. They have a lot of requirements around where people can come and go at and so they tend to do a lot of access control interior and if you're using multi factor that slows people down but a lot of times they'll have a card plus pin so they're not necessarily doing biometric biometric is that that thing that you are. So we talked about three forms of authentication, something you have which is your card, something you know which is that code and something you are and that's considered sort of the highest level of assurance other than personal identification. Like when I see you I know that that's you and that's still considered the highest form despite all the Tom Cruise movies where they're all wearing masks and stuff. People don't do that right? People aren't coming up to the front door and masks trying to be on mission impossible are they? I've been at it for 20 years and haven't seen that. I don't know that it doesn't occur in the movie level. People do wear masks to thwart cameras however so you know it's really easy to wear to put a to obscure or obfuscate your face if you're trying to not be detected by surveillance cameras so that's something that's one reason cameras sort of are not really security you know cameras are a form of an evidence gathering realistically. Speaking of sort of peering in on somebody from above I like I said I looked at your website and one of the things that you highlighted that you guys do is audio visual security and as in you know and sort of the verbiage on your thing is about listening what you know listening to what's going on in your business are people listening are companies out there like miking up you know it's their business it's their security are they miking up rooms like so they can listen on their employees not without telling people and you still requires permission however in a space where you're looking say you're watching a parking garage for example you know you've probably got a call button there in case someone needs assistance anyway like you see the blue towers right the cold blue towers so there's absolutely a lot of benefit to be able to speak into that space as well as to listen from it right so a lot of times you when you've got say you just put a camera out on a parking lot of let's say a auto car lot right and some kids out there vandalizing the cars for example when I can take audio and project it out there to them as well and let them know that I see them they're wearing a blue shirt brown pants police are on the way that tends to get a movement off the site quite a bit quicker which is what you really want to do is stop what they're doing where the surveillance alone only allows me to see what they what they were doing so being able to interact audibly or visually you know audio with audio into a remote site is very very important part of being able to actually have surveillance on that site sometimes the way you you may see two people interacting and think that they're fighting and if you could listen to what they're talking about perhaps you'd find out that they're just very excited about a sale that they found or something you know so there's a lot of reasons a lot of benefit to be able to have audio in a place and typically the law just says we have to put signage up to indicate that people are under surveillance that audios may or may not be being recorded so does this what integrated security technology does that you'd set up the cameras and all of that audio stuff for a company yeah we install all that infrastructure cabling so you know conduit and cabling and then we would install the equipment itself we specified sometimes if the customer doesn't have a consultant they're working with or someone or doesn't know what they need in the design they may come to us with a problem and we'll design a solution for them and then once it's installed you know we picked some sort of a platform to drive that with be it an access control platform some folks like to drive from a video surveillance platform and then you know intercom is typically just a feature that's used you can imagine putting a card reader on a door and someone arrives at that door that doesn't have access to the facility or they need to call somebody or they're going to start banging on the door right so intercom kind of goes hand in hand with access control and then there are typically you've also got an intrusion layer there as well you know we sense the door positions with an access control system or you know we want that door position known so I know when it was open with an authorized card reader I know if it was open from the inside by an authorized request to exit but if it gets forced open without a card read or request to exit I need to know that as well that's a break in so access controls doing a little bit more than people think about a lot of people that use it just think it's like electronic door opening but we're actually sensing that door position and I also know if I can set that an alert if the door gets held open let's say for 60 seconds or 90 seconds when people stopped smoking inside buildings and everybody had to go outside to smoke we used to get a lot of doors propped open because people would want to go out outside and smoke for a few minutes and then come back in the same door but if the door had access control on it would have a door held alarm so that would let us know what was going on because typically the smoking was supposed to be done in a certain area not out in the back warehouse area or whatever it may be so there's a lot of stuff happening with an access control system and that tends to be the platform that we drive from and all the other all the other sensors and all the other equipment is kind of peripheral and all those activities are related inside the database so when I need to see what occurred I can go in to an an event of some type maybe it was a door opening event maybe it was a door held event and with the click of a button kind of pull up the door event know who used the door the video associated with it the last time it was used maybe if there was audio associated with that file whatever it may be let's me very quickly get a report on what occurred. If you just heard that that was the the company dog over there. Nice. Very cool you've been doing this for a very long time long time it sounds like you've been a security guy and over this time you you know you were talking basically about technology here and you've seen things get progress over this time obviously and what do you see as the next security sort of technology coming you know what space should people be looking at if they're thinking about you know the future and securing their their space their perimeter if you will. Yeah so I think the perimeter is going to continue to be the focus a lot of. Folks can't afford to secure their entire perimeter for example you think of your your parking areas right where you've got staff that have to travel to a vehicle well that could be a very large parking lot so really secure in that perimeter is rarely done yeah. Most people let the perimeter fall back to the building itself and they can secure the doors maybe the front door back door side door entrances things like that so I think the pushing out of perimeter security is going to continue to grow a lot of that today is being done with analytics through through video and audio analytics which have become quite a bit more reliable we used to get a lot of really bad false positives in the industry and those the analytic engines have just become much much more robust today where we're getting you know 98 99% accuracy in the detection rates so very low amount of false positives meaning that if I'm trying to detect a person you know I've said I want to pick this large of a pixel I want it to be this big before I get alert you know it's not triggering because a small cat wandered through or something like that right so that the analytics on the audio side you know we've got a lot we've got analytics to detect people running analytics that can listen for the sound of a fight analytics that can listen for a car glass breaking and those are getting very obviously gunshot analytics have been around for quite a while you know and so we're getting better even today at pinpointing you know what type of weapon fired and actually how far away it was from the sensor so there's been a there's been a lot of advance in analytics and before these were analytics had to run on a PC a dedicated server to process it all today we're pushing the analytics out to the edge a lot of them are being performed in the camera or in the intercom device itself right out the edge so that we're only sending events that are meet a certain threshold for example to the server for processing and I think that that's the next sort of big wave you know we're machine learning obviously we're not we're not this industry doesn't isn't priced where it can take advantage of artificial intelligence yet but analytics and machine learning are definitely coming into the retail space first you know they're watching dwell times how long you stood in front of something and trying to you know send you a quick sale price before you walk away and all that kind of stuff so that space has got a its own its own sort of advances in analytics and then in the electronic security side what we're doing we're definitely interested in finding ways to push you know perimeter security out you know reliably instead of you know stringing you know fiber optic you know sensors around the entire perimeter things like that are expensive to do and primarily have been within the realm of DoD to date although there are some some commercial entities that service you know that are in the sort of that supply chain of regulated industries that have done a little bit of that kind of work you know it just depends sort of on the environment where you're at some of the college campuses have gone to great extent in some of the some of the cities where they have more of a high active crime area near to the campus and so they've gone to extending those perimeter systems quite a ways out there just to detect things earlier this in the same way that you have a burglar alarm and the police are coming it takes 10 minutes to get there all perimeter detection does is lower gets you notified sooner that something's going on that you want to detect and let you respond quicker so that incident doesn't continue to move in in closer to your assets that's that's that's crazy like I a lot of that stuff is really interesting to me and I think I could probably talk to you forever about it but but I do need to talk to you about social media because that's what I do and I like to hear what other people are doing and only because you know everybody is told that they need to have it and you know I have people come to me and say hey everybody says I've got a business online I need to have it what am I supposed to do and every sort of story is different and I went to your website that's usually the first thing I do and I look at a person's website and I see what social media accounts or that do they just put right there on their website and you've got a few out there you've got you one you got your website going on out there your Facebook your Twitter linked in Google plus that paper dot L I thing and then this YouTube that I talked about earlier to Hibachi talk do you feel like that your social media presence or your online presence is bringing business to you or are or is it just something that you feel like you need to do so great it's a great question and I obviously we we we got our first really large national level deal from Yahoo from our website in 1999 so we sold services in 1999 I just want to say that I don't know if we sold anything since from our website but we you know we obviously we're we're somewhat tech savvy and you know we always had a web presence and it's been built and kind of you know then left a left a linger and then built again over the years and but the rise of social media made all of that so much easier right because all that static data you know you want to do things on a website that aren't simple if you're not a coder and they're not easy to display if you don't know how to rapidly whip that up so social media made that so much easier and the first thing we started with was I think we built a Facebook account for our company and you know we were able to put the events that we host and all that kind of stuff on there and it lets you you know I never really necessarily put up specials but we would be featured in magazines and I could put that stuff up quickly via it whether it was a link to an article or a PDF of an article whatever I could get it up there so there it gave us ways to put stuff out then I went I started a LinkedIn account for the company as well and did had quite a bit of success publishing information there that was relevant and more more not six I don't know about success but greater adoption greater recognition really from the industry folks on the mainland than was in Hawaii so my our customer base in Hawaii doesn't seem to spend a lot of time online actually looking at our social media for example or following it or that I don't I don't find many of them commenting on it near as much as industry peers that I have on the mainland do so then you know we had those two going and they're they're somewhat static when you compare them to the you know the rise of Twitter and what we were able to do there I used paper lead to publish a a sort of a blog and I was quite active with that for a while so I kind of got used to it and then I've sort of gotten into the media with Hibachi Talks so I found that make videos are a lot more powerful than just you know writing stuff although I did have quite a bit of success taking my blog which is you know original content taking that out throwing it out on like LinkedIn and getting a lot of comments and I use Hootsuite to publish so I can publish those pieces that I think are you know important I can either publish them from myself or from our company or from that blog site which is Security Leadership Institute some of them I typically will put them always out on our Facebook page and out on our Google page and on our LinkedIn page if I'm publishing from myself and it's maybe related to the industry but not necessarily IST I may publish that under my my personal LinkedIn and not IST so I do a lot of work in the cybersecurity on behalf of our industry which is not I don't want people to get confused that IST is in that cybersecurity business and because I'm not such a proponent I'm out and you know in the public a lot with that there's a bit of confusion there so I try to avoid that in the social media space where I can um if do you feel here's one of the questions that I get from people asking me about it the the amount of work that it takes to run a successful social media sort of presence it's it's kind of a lot of work right like yeah just one person if that's the person going to do it right on a from a are you the person or like this does IST just have sort of you and or do you or do you have somebody handling that and what is that work sort of like yeah so so I do it which is why it really goes up and down you know we when we travel it goes down some events I'm really good at taking time to to sort of make a presence out of that event and let everyone know that we're there ISTs there we're we're meeting with speakers or we're learned something new about the industry and I'll pass that on so when I'm when I'm active enough with that stuff and taking you know being what so we're mindful enough to whip out my camera and take a quick shot then that plays very well I a big integrated marketing campaign I studied communications I know what that is I've yet to be able to to effectively just kind of keep one going all the time because I feel like I'm a bit of a one-man army I have been able to leverage the other sources of media that I contribute to so I'm a I don't know a published writer in some of the national trade magazines and I'm frequently asked for my opinion on pieces so I'll you know when they print that I'll use that media stuff to help to publish you know which drives you know definitely drives views of that material which hopefully reinforces IST out there or or myself maybe as a SME for the industry but it's not a it's surely not become a mover of business for IST you know per se so I don't take it too seriously you know I mean it's easy to be like a a legend in your own mind you know just because wow I put some stuff out and people liked it like you know I'm not a I'm I don't feel like a sort of an industry thought leader but I am a pursuer of knowledge in the industry thought-sharer you know I like to I like to share other things that I wow if I find it valuable I think other people may hopefully our customers may and kind of understand the way we approach doing doing security for them and things like that so that's you know that's a that's cool that you said that because I you know a lot of people come and they think that it's going to make them money being on social media but I think what I try to tell them a lot of people it can be if you have like the coolest service and you're the coolest cat you know what I mean and yeah right person touched you I talked about you you know it's really that sort of a gang sort of mentality that happens if you want to go viral and become really big using it but I using it to share sort of your business knowledge and your sort of industry knowledge to promote yourself I think is where you know the what becomes perception becomes reality you know for people and you know when you set yourself up like that as I am the industry leader look look at all this stuff out here that says here's my resume here's all the information you put it out there and then people trigger on that and they recognize it I think that's sort of the payoff in the end for this is sort of when you use social media that's right I have to I have to agree because especially so you know we take life safety very seriously which is what security is at the end of the day you know when I got when I really there wasn't much of a living in my background was in psychology and anthropology right and there's that's either teaching or writing and I end up going back to technology for a career I probably had at that time many many ways to go and when I discovered the electronic security industry and maybe it was left over from my time in the military but I really felt like you know here's a way to take technology and use it to protect people and to protect things and that was sort of the the basis when we first our ISTR tagline was like real security solutions today the teams years ago they voted that out and today it's like leading Hawaii to a safer place you know so we like to take that the high-level stuff that we've learned in our DOD spaces and take that that philosophy and that technology and then deliver it out into the community of Hawaii because the our neighbors our schools our churches our businesses all deserve the same level of protection that our military has you know and so they maybe all can't get there with one uh contract you know but they can build towards it and being able to help a customer build over time to continue to improve the security that they have for their their people on in their business and the assets that they need to protect to continue to operate you know you know hopefully profitably um is important to us and so that's our sort of the vision that our team has today and they're out there is just doing it every day you know I just get to talk about it that's that's super cool and that that's a perfect way to segue out of this episode keeping people safe it's you know it's how can you go wrong with that right uh I love it that's what we do I think that's interesting people don't really oftentimes when I think of security or perimeter you think of keeping people just out versus keeping people safe you know yeah there's people on the inside that need to be protected right sort of the flip side of that well Andrew thank you very much for being on the show I really appreciate it if somebody wanted a business out there wanted to talk to you about upgrading their security etc how do they do that integrate our istex.net istes.net look us up give us a call cool awesome thanks for being on that information will be in the description etc to this um all right man thank you very much hey Ian thanks a lot a lot