 Hello, hi, everybody, and welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios. We're here for another episode of Security Matters Hawaii. And today we've got a former Hawaii guy. He's moved on to another integration firm on the mainland, Rob Van Huss is with us. His title is Service Jedi. So we're talking to a guy who really knows the industry intricacies from a technology perspective in and out. Rob, thanks so much for joining us today, man. Thank you, Andrew. Thanks for having me. I'm honored to be here. He worries. Good stuff. It's always good to get the former Hawaii guys back on. I had Colin Farron here recently. He's with Knight Security now, and I think he's in Austin. But good to see. Looks like you're doing well, man. So I'm glad to have you on. Let's go for those of our viewers who may not know you. Let's kind of give them some of your history, some of your background, as much as you sort of care to share. Okay. So yeah, I lived in Hawaii for almost 12 years. It was from 1997 to 2008. And where I was in the low voltage industry, got started off in the fire alarms. Working in a lot. I was mostly in Waikiki, down in the hotels down there working on the fire alarms. Wow. I did that for about four or five years. And then while I was in the fire alarm industry, I got a small taste of the security industry. A little bit of access control, a little bit of video, but just a very tiny bit. But every time I was able to dabble in that, I liked it so much better than fire alarms. It was just, it was so much more interesting. And I wound up, you know, moving to another company that did primarily access control and video. It didn't last very long. It was about four months. And then, and then I found you guys that integrated security technologies. Awesome. And, and that was, that was awesome. I saw I was with you guys for three years. And that's when I got introduced to Lendell and working with you and Christine. And that was a fantastic experience. So we let you get away. I want to put a big shout out to you guys. You know, I always think of you like family. So again, never forget where you came from. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. Good company. Yeah. And so you got, I remember you got, you got married and you went, you went to, I mean, so did you go, did you end up in California at first or were you, where'd you head to? I think Vegas, right? Yeah. So we moved, we moved away from Hawaii in 2008. I had a newborn, I had a newborn daughter and so we were just looking for some more space. And we, we found a opportunity with Netronix integration in Las Vegas and they were just starting a new office over there. They had this big project with an Amazon warehouse. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I know Steve, Dakota and Craig, Jared, those guys really well. Great company. Yeah. No, they were fantastic. Craig and Steve, just fantastic guys. And then, so the, that was back in 2008, pretty much after we wrapped up that warehouse, that big Amazon distribution center, that's kind of when the economy went south and I kept having to go to California to stay busy and it was like, well, so I wound up just moving to California. And I found, that's when I found integrated security technologies, that was in, yeah, late 2008 and still, they're still putting up with me. So, you know. Yeah. Our convergent, you mean? Yeah. Our, yes, convergent. Yeah, convergent. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a good career path though because starting sort of small here, we had some good sized projects here, but I can't imagine. So a distribution warehouse about a decade ago, what, what was going in there? Was it, was it full blown access? Was it all integrated, a big integrated system like to the, did Amazon have an enterprise at that point? As much as you can say, I guess you can't share too much about their security, but online anyway. No, it was an enterprise system. I didn't really get involved much with the front end of it. I was just installing the hardware out in the field and they had a guy out of Seattle that kind of brought it into their, you know, into their enterprise system. Don't remember his name, but we did, we did work together for quite a while, about four, took about four months. Wow. And it was, this was a 600, at the time, a 600,000 square foot warehouse and, and they were just in a small little corner of it. They weren't even occupying the whole thing. But now I understand that they, they occupy the whole thing, you know, Amazon just kind of exploded. Well, I think they've taken over the world, right? Don't we have, they got, don't they have like blimps and drones and, I mean, I don't mean, I can't imagine like the security of their environment now. I have to get somebody on. I used to know a guy there. I think he's there, but I'm not sure if he does physical anymore, jocks. I think it was last. I'm going to get him on. Maybe we can talk about that. The, the enterprise guys don't like to talk a lot about, you know, their, their, what do you call it, their, their threat surface, you know? So they, they share a little, it's kind of like DoD. They'll tell you a little bit, but not anything useful, you know? Yeah, I guess I don't want to say too much about it, but. So you got out to the West Coast and you got back into, again, are you, so you're into enterprise space? Is it SMB? What kind of, what's going on on the West Coast, you know? So what I've been doing is mostly working on college campuses. Wow. Okay. And we're doing, we're doing a lot of airport security as well, but, but on the college campus. So I, I spend, I've been spending most of my time at a USC where they've got just a lot of camera, a lot of cameras and a lot of it's a wireless. So we, I don't know if you're familiar with fire tide at all. Yeah, yeah. But okay. So we, we kind of started off with that. And we're putting a bunch of cameras on this, this, this huge fire tide mesh network. And of course that's all five and six gigahertz 802.11 technology. So it has its limitations. Yeah. For bandwidth. That's interesting. Can you share with us what is it? So when you have a mesh and we're trying to deploy on a mesh, are we, there's got to be my guest aggregation points on the mesh, right? So is that where you get, start to get throughput struggles or is it truly out even at the end points as well? I think you could bring it in. It's just when you start aggregating a bunch of video at once, you know, you're going to have some, you know, some, some tight, tight points. Right. Well, it's kind of both because so out in the field, the struggle is, okay, so all these, all these fire tide antennas are out there and they're using the same 802.11 channels that everybody else is using for their wifi at home. And so every once in a while, you get degraded video, you go out there and you have to do a spectrum analysis and then you find out that, oh, that this channel is saturated because, you know, somebody, somebody went to Best Buy and it got a wifi router and just plugged it in and now all of a sudden your video doesn't work. So, so that has been an issue. But now we're moving to a different technology and the 60 and 70 gigahertz or 60 and 70 gigahertz range with a different product called Siklu. Yep. And it's, it's, it's amazing. It's like Game Changer. It's like wireless Game Changer, you know? Yeah, it seems to me it's interesting because you know the fire tide stuff and a lot of that that equipment and that frequency spectrum, it's supposed to hop around and it's supposed to work, right? But you get, like you said, you'll get someone inexperienced who won't have turn on that frequency agility, right? So they'll lock on channel six and if other people are on channels, they don't even realize that they're not getting the throughput there because they're having the same struggle you're having, right? When they're competing for that bandwidth and they don't know because it's just ridiculous. We used, we had a lot of success with Siklu as well at the, you know, the Aloha Stadium, you know, the, we had some elevators and some places we needed to get ready to go wireless and the Siklu worked really well. Oh, okay, okay. So you, you know what I'm talking about? I don't know. I don't know. I can't imagine a wireless campus. I'd be, I'd probably run from that project just because it might be scared, but you know, it's a, but you're the Jedi, so you could probably deal with it. Because I struggle with the force though, you know, so it's a struggle for everybody. Don't we all. Don't we all. So, talk, can you give us an idea of what, you know, with some of these newer technologies, what are you able to accomplish? A lot of the cameras are super high megapix today, five megapix, I can imagine outdoor you may have some eights or 10s or 12s or whatever. So what, is there a tradeoff there where you have to, you know, maybe scaled out back some of the frame rates to, to make everything work together or are you achieving what you need to achieve with, in that, in that frequency? Yeah. So, you know, that's a good question. So a lot of it, a lot of it depends on the environment that you're in. Yeah. And it depends on the equipment that you're using because we're doing a lot of license plate recognition as well. So if we have a, if we have a mesh that's set up and just doing license plate recognition, well, that's just transmitting kilobits per second. So if we have, yeah. So if we have a really, you know, bad connection, usually it doesn't matter too much if it's just license plate cameras. But then when it comes to the, yeah, you get a bunch of access PTZ's on the same network and now all of a sudden you need 50, 60 megabits per second or, or. 50 or I should say 50, 60 gigabits per second. And, and you really got some challenges. So you got to, you know, go around trees. The thing about the Siklu stuff, it has to be line of sight with the fire tide stuff. It'll barrel through a tree, but maybe not as efficient, you know. And RF is kind of a neat technology. You know, when you, when you start messing with it, you realize you can actually bounce signals off of buildings to get where you need to go. Yeah. You can bounce it off of a parking lot. So our different structures or whatever. So yeah, you really just got to kind of get in there and sort of feel your way around it to make it work the way you want to. Well, especially in a campus where you've got such a, you know, broad USC is a big campus. I mean, I've been up there. Do you, when you said, you know, using the Spectrum Analyzer, is this, do you have also a directional antenna that you're using? Or do you have to, or do you have to use kind of different types of antennas to see what's going on in your environment? No, now when I, when we do a Spectrum Analysis with Firetide, it just has a built-in functionality in the, in the radios themselves. So we just do it through the Firetide. I got you. Okay. Yeah. Now, you know, as you know, you can, there's apps you can download and put on your phone. And I mean, the range on it is not that great. But you can kind of do a Spectrum Analysis just in your immediate area, just on your phone, and kind of see what's, what's being used and where you can, you know, so if you're having bad Wi-Fi at home, you can download an app and do a Spectrum Analysis. Like you were saying, a lot of people don't realize they can do that. They just go, man, why, why is my internet not working? Yeah, yeah. You do the router. So not everybody's a technical Jedi. We're going to take a break. We got Rob Van Huss here. He's walking us through some real industry issues out there. We got to pay some bills. Rob will be back in about one minute. Hang on. Aloha, I'm Stan Osterman, Stan the energy man. Every Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii, if you're really interested in finding out what's going on in energy, especially here in Hawaii, but also all the way around the world and especially if it has to do with hydrogen, look into Stan the energy man. Every Friday, 12 o'clock, Think Tech Hawaii, be there, Aloha. Hi, I'm Rusty Kamori, host of Beyond the Lines. I was the head coach for the Punahou Boys varsity tennis team for 22 years and we're fortunate to win 22 consecutive state championships. This show is based on my book, which is also titled Beyond the Lines. And it's about leadership, creating a superior culture of excellence, achieving and sustaining success and finding greatness. If you're a student, parent, sports or business person and want to improve your life and the lives of people around you, tune in and join me on Mondays at 11 a.m. as we go beyond the lines on Think Tech Hawaii, Aloha. And we're back at Think Tech Hawaii Studios lab today on security matters. So why we got Rob Van Huss, technical jet out of conversion technologies in California. Rob, welcome back. We were we were we were cruising through some RF issues, which I know I've I've seen my guys chomping on their their nails and doing these spectrum analysis. And you know, the thing about that environment is it changes, right? You can get out there one day and everything's fine. And the next day, someone's introduced something that interferes with what you were doing, right? So you got to work around it. That's the customers, they understand that a little bit. They they take your explanation, but you got to fix it. And then, of course, the next day, somebody else lights something up, right? And so it can be a cat and mouse game out there. Are you seeing a wireless any access control wireless? You know, there's a lot of wireless doors and stuff like that. Or are colleges moving to some of that? I know they've been playing with different types of credentials and mobile credentials and a lot of that kind of stuff as well. So I'm not sure what's going on at some of the campuses you have there in Cali. Yes, in fact, so we are doing some some Schlage wireless on a lot of a lot of the classrooms. And that's actually been in place for a while. OK, and it's, you know, I don't know if you're familiar with the the eighty four hundred locks and yeah, yeah. So, yeah, we do. We do a lot of those, but they have their own in-house lock shop. And they they have they pretty much keep up with that. I would say, for the most part, and if if they get overwhelmed or if they just get swamped with work, then they might call us to come and look at something. But for the most part, they keep up with it. And. Also, with some of the aerospace like Boeing's. Oh, yeah. Lockheed Martin, I believe they have wireless readers at the guard shacks just so that they can walk around and and get somebody's credentials without them having to get out of the vehicle or whatever. Oh, like I like a handheld reader. Yeah. Right. Not too much of that going on, but a little bit. Yeah, I don't mess with it a whole lot, to be honest with you. It's interesting how the the campuses, you know, set up their own shop. You know, we're seeing a lot of because because like the eighty four hundred, specifically, you know, a nice, very old, excellent, you know, piece of hardware that's been retooled with some electronics in it now. And realistically, almost anyone can install it. It's super easy to to to get onto a door. Super easy to use. And then on the programming side, it sounds like they've they've got some guys there that can handle that's usually where we see a lot of deployments. And I don't know if you see this where the like the door, not the architect, but the door hardware provider will maybe drop all that hardware in, but they're not technical, they can't online it or configure it. So there's some there's been a changing in our industry for like what you call traditional locksmith type guys doing that kind of door hardware work. Do you see that there? Is it seem like the integrators handling the the deployment as well? Or what do you think some is the sum of each? It is. It is some of each. OK. A lot of times, you know, it'll it'll just kind of it comes in waves. I mean, we might do a whole bunch of we might do a building with a whole bunch of wireless locks for a particular site, but then we might not touch it again for a while. And typically, after we hand it over to the customer, they they they've got some pretty smart guys. Yeah. So they they don't call us too much. That's good. That stuff. That's more just when they don't want to be able to. Yeah, I enjoy working with the IT teams at these companies. I mean, it's there's been a we talked about it for years, this convergence. And I think it's come, you know, to to the foray in our industry, at least. I mean, if we get a project engaged and only facilities is there and IT's not there, we just like to say, wait, wait, wait, wait. Stop. Where's your IT team? Because we're going to need them, you know. And there's there's a lot less resistance to that. I think it was a money money game before like facilities, one of the money and IT, one of the money. And now they just agree they need to work together. Yeah. So. Yeah. You know, that's of course, a big part of, you know, what we're doing. And it's more and more just dealing with IT. And in fact, with at Convergent, I mean, we have our we have IT field technicians now, but that's something we didn't see four or five years ago. And now we have, you know, guys that are, you know, Cisco certified guys out in the field working with IT departments that we need to interface our equipment with. So. Pretty interesting. And it's and it's great because it gives service tax and installation tax, someone from our company that we can go to without having to rely on their IT and, you know, how IT guys are. They are going to blow you off as much as they can. So now we got something, somebody with a convergent business card that's an IT technician, so they can't escape nearly as easy. Yeah, I kind of made on the service side. It's always like this IP address is in use and the IT guy from the company is like, no, it's not. I'm like, yes, it is. You have an IP conflict. This one you gave me is in use. Go check your network. No, it's not. You know, like that I've been down that exact road with you. I know it's and it's great to have have some help and also have. I think, you know, I don't know if you've seen this. It sounds like you have where you've got some of your engineering team that's got credentials on their network to look at some things or to do some things on your customer's network. So that's a piece of, you know, we VPN into some of the networks and things like exit allows us to fix some things and test some day. I'd wait for days on a customer to get me an answer about something. Probably if I had to wait for their IT department because they're all busy. Right. And, you know, in that way, I've been really fortunate a lot. And in fact, a lot of our service guys, you know, with the VPN access at different places, there's I don't want to say this. There's some days we could probably sit at home and and and get a lot done. Yeah. Yeah. Except except with three kids, I can't do it. Usually if I have an opportunity to work remotely, I wind up going to the office anyway, because there's just too many distractions at my house. Get the work done at home. Yeah. That's awesome. Well, at least you're honest about it. That's some of the remote workforce isn't as forthcoming as you are. They would like to say their home. I think they get their work done. But I just think it takes them to actually work longer. It takes them 14 hours to get eight hours of work done because of the other things they got going on in the home. You know, working from home. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah. So and so just to work with a lot of the systems on a lot of our sites, we have to have remote access and a lot of our customers are just they're more than happy to give it to us if we really need it, you know, because they know it keeps their costs lower too. Yeah. So let's touch on a little bit of since we're there. Let's talk. So you get, you know, you got a VPN. They've got some identification for you or they provide you a laptop just from a cybersecurity perspective. How are you authenticating? Does it you be key? You got a multi factor authentication? Are you seeing some of each? Like, do you want remote access to a guy who doesn't, you know, have have good IDM policies or something? I don't know. Yeah. You know, it it seems to me, you know, there was a site that insisted that we use their laptop of a couple of years ago. And I really can't even remember who it was. But for the most part, though, I just use my own laptop and we just have two factor authentication. Yeah. On your top, provided by the on the provider from the customer. Yeah. Oh, I know who that was at first. It was it was one of the airlines, Alaska Airlines, I believe. But then they finally said, OK, yeah, you can use your laptop. Just we're going to do two factor authentication. So it worked pretty well. Yeah. And then they maybe do some scans against it or run some services against it. Particularly your ports are locked down. You're on a segregated network. I mean, there's but the risk is there. You know, there's always that risk of, you know, a service provider bringing a problem into your network. And, you know, we've been through that with with our industry as well as others. So sounds like the what's your feeling about the college campus security? I mean, you know, we've got this age of these, you know, hostile, you know, events and, you know, active shooter and all this kind of stuff. You do you see the campuses investing pretty heavily in security? The students, what's your what's your feeling a little bit about lockdown and some of that stuff? I know you're a shooter. I'm a shooter. What do you what do you think about the kind of the state of the security culture on campuses? Yeah, you know, we've had a couple of events where we've had a active shooter. And fortunately, it wasn't while while I was here. Yeah. Or it wasn't while I was present. I was somewhere around, but I just wasn't physically here at that time. And, you know, not really a whole lot has been done, except for just, you know, more cameras. Like, we don't have any any shooter, any gunshot detection systems that that I'm aware of it. Now, LAPD might have their own, in fact, that I know they probably do. But, you know, most of the issues that that we face is just like out in the field around campus, even as, you know, we've had we've had hostile people come up to us and while we're installing cameras, you know, they know what we're doing. And yeah, we we've never. We had a now this didn't happen over here, but I think in Carson, we had a guy that actually had a gun pulled on him. And yeah, that we we demanded that they provide us with an armed escort ever since then. I think they accommodate us there. Yeah, it's kind of an it's kind of an OSHA requirement to provide your employee with a safe working environment. Right. So he's got to do installation. Unfortunately, right. That's crazy. Right. Well, we're coming to the end. I think I got about 20 seconds left. If you want to give us a last minute plug for conversion or for the industry. Final thoughts, you know, I just. Just again, want to, you know, shout out to integrated security technologies. Fantastic company. And I would not be where I'm at today with with conversion, if not for you guys. Wow. Thank you. So it's it's been a fantastic transition, you know, just a journey with the security company in the security industry. So it's just been you guys are awesome. You always be like family. And on convergence been a fantastic company to grow with as well. Awesome. Well, thanks, Rob. I really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today. Hello, hi to everybody. We'll see you next. I don't think I'm here next week. I think I'm on the road, but I'll be back soon enough. Take care and be safe. Aloha. Thank you.