 Use a minute or two to go, and I'll give you those as well. You see that, and you're going to be right back naturally. Thanks, brother. Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Aloha, and welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studios. Andrew, the security guy here. We're going to be talking about entrance control systems. We've got Mike Johnson in here from Orion Interance Controls. Thanks for coming down. I know it's your vacation, or where are you working? I'm working. OK, well, he's here working, so we got a little extra work out of him. And we're also going to have his boss on remote, Steve Caracelli, the CEO and founder of Orion Interance Controls. What I like to do when I start off is kind of get a feel for what's keeping you up at night these days. We're all security guys. There's a lot going on. Yeah, I just did a situational awareness training a couple of weeks ago with InfraGuard, and that kind of was my overriding. Like, wow, I feel like maybe we're all asleep at the wheel. So it's just, yeah, I think that's one of the things that really making sure that we're all aware of that what we live in today is an environment that we really need to be paying attention to what we're doing and how we're doing it. That's definitely something that. It's not top of mind for an average person on the street. No, it's not. Hey, Steve, can we pop Steve up there? Steve, I know you're busy manufacturing things, and I know that keeps you up at night, probably. But from a security perspective, what's top of mind for you? What keeps you up at night? Honestly, the whole team talks about the situational awareness thing around just so many things happen that people are paying attention to, but also just being an American manufacturer today, looking at the influx of other technologies coming from outside of the country, looking at our labor pool. There's a lot of conversation about training and labor, and just making sure that the young people today, and the older people today, the veterans are employed in the right place doing good things. Awesome, thank you. Yeah, I can definitely echo our industry. I just gave a talk recently on the electronic security industry as a supply chain vulnerability. We've got definitely problems we've identified in our people, in our processes, and in some of our products. Now, you guys have a great story. You're American made. I want to get to that. But I'd like to talk about, when people say entrance control, most of the world just walks through the door. There's a lot of design. There's a lot of thought that's gone on to most facilities, hopefully, sometimes, in that getting those people in that door. So take us back to the beginnings of entrance control and your experience in the market and what sort of brought you here to where you're at today. Well, entrance control is definitely you have to think about the entire envelope. You have to think about the experience of the user. You have to think about what level of security you're going to need. And so it's important at the very beginning to have those conversations to really sit down and plan it out. And a lot of people don't do that. And that's very unfortunate. It's very unfortunate. That's the thing that we really want them to do. We really want to have that conversation with them and say, what are you trying to prevent? What are your threats? What are the things that you're concerned about? That's where we really like to be. And I know I work in a variety of regulated industries, as well as DoD, and the needs are different. And the concerns are different, depending on the type of facility. So who's the most active in your experience in designing good entrance control versus where do you see a gap in the market where it just doesn't exist and there's been no thought at all? Actually, Steve, what do you think on that one? I think a lot of people look at the front door and there's a lot of focus, especially architecturally, on the front lobby. A lot of your traditional, your smoking doors, your fire exit doors get missed, your loading dock area gets missed, especially when you're considered your transient population, that being your delivery folks, your floor callers, or they're going to maybe look for it to do something that you shouldn't want them to do. But even the people that are supposed to be on the building get missed a lot. I've been in this industry 26 years between Los Angeles, California, New York City, coast to coast in different environments. And to this day, it's not a joke, but it's a pretty common thing to say, somebody that understands and has a little bit of a knowledge can pretty much walk into a building today if you know where those vulnerabilities are. Carry a clipboard, carry a hard hat, look like you're supposed to be somewhere, which brings us back to the situational awareness. So we're always looking at that technology piece is how can we bring awareness to those situations that aren't typically there, like those other doors. Obviously, and then it's just a control platform with optical turnstiles on the products we produce are very heavily influenced by the front lobby, because that's, again, where the money is, where the focus is, yeah. So, did I answer the question? Yeah, I think so, is the, so do you find architects, engineering, consulting sort of role important? Are they initiating this conversation? Cause I can understand in new design, right? Obviously the questions hopefully get brought up. Now that doesn't mean they get budgeted properly, but hopefully the questions get asked. In a retrofit type of a market, sort of what are the challenges that you walk into there? You know where, you know? Yeah, that is a, that's a very long, very long list, but a lot of the, first of all, we hope that the architects and the consultants that are involved with that retrofit are asking these questions, if they're not asking the questions, and we try and aid them with that. But in old building, old infrastructure, you know, things that, you know, you can't core the floor because it's historic or you can't core the floor because it's post-tension, right? Seismic reasons, so on and so forth. It's important to make sure that you're having those conversations as well so that you can and we do compensate for that and allow for that. So Steve, has that been, you know, obviously, you know, you're manufacturing this equipment. Was it, did you start off saying, hey, we're gonna go after the new build market? Or is there a real honest retro market out there that's available, just a little, probably longer lead time? Or is it some of both? It's actually some of both. And when we sat down, we were very intentional in the way we designed the product to be flexible. So as an example, we make the smallest footprint. So if we're retrofitting a larger product, we can make the cabinet bigger and longer to cover those flooring construction issues. Conversely, our electronics package can be mounted into other people's cabinets. So if the cabinet still looks good, we can retrofit and upgrade the electronics in some cases. And you know, basically have a new optical product with the existing cabinetry. Because when the industry started, there was no standard. So there was a lot of customers in a lot of unique designs. So if you kind of look back, you know, 15, 20 years, if there are still some out there that are that old, we do a lot of modifications of those. The kind of right around the 9-11 timeframe, you know, thinking that today is September 11th, so it's a lot on my heart today. But there was a lot of optical turnstiles put in in that timeframe, you know, some in the right way and some not the right way. But either way, they're outdated. If not the technology, the lobbies are being updated. So we're doing a lot of remover at place today. So our product line was designed intentionally with that in mind, but also to make sure that we're intentional about future-proofing. So when we design a cabinet, we're making sure we've got flexibility to change outskins, tops, but also add technology. I'm sure you're seeing, Andrew, there's a lot of push and it's finally becoming mature in the biometric space. Where you're seeing retinal, retinal, facial, even fingerprint, frictionless fingerprint becoming more mainstream. It's at the infancy still, but I think the algorithms are there where you're seeing more of that coming into play, especially in an axis and motion environment, like a lobby, you know, where there's a lot of people moving that very quickly. Are you seeing that out there as well? Yeah, I mean, I think that on the DOD side, there's a lot of discussion that Spay wore about how are we gonna implement multi-factor biometric authentication? You know, those guys either secure the entire perimeter and then let you move around the facility or they secure only the higher level areas. So, you know, ease of movement is still important, although, you know, it is the DOD. And so they've got, you know, when we're skiffing out rooms, we're seeing more and more of this question about future technology, how are we gonna implement it? Where's the biometric gonna live, for example? I think also out here, it seems like the banks. The banks are pretty good about turnstiles, although to me, the turnstiles are the older mechanical style that I would presume you folks are replacing. Is the financial sector a big, I mean, I realize that's probably a nice lobby thing, but is that a big market for entrance control? Oh, absolutely. There's a lot of removing replace happening right now, as well as trying to keep up with the regulations. As they get, you know, stricter, they're honing in on how they wanna secure those spaces, how they wanna actually kind of compartmentalize if they're just gonna secure the envelope as a whole, like you said, and move around freely, or are they really gonna try and dial in and get to certain spots? Excuse me, so yeah, that's absolutely happening a lot. And let's talk a little bit about anti-passback, because where I see a turnstile in, a turnstile out, you know, probably those facilities are, at least keeping track of where those people are, they know who's on site. Is that a popular thing, or do you really find people just letting people in? Is anti-passback almost a natural when I've got a turnstile? You wanna take this one? Yeah, absolutely. The great question, we're seeing anti-passback. Traditionally, people wanna badge in and freely walk out. So we see a lot of timed anti-passback, like in a parking application, where that access badge or that credential may not be used again for as much as five minutes. In a true anti-passback, of course, you card in and out. And again, that's what drove us to start looking at those secondary doors. If I may, we just released a product that we call Door Guard for those single door applications, primarily from a life-safety standpoint. If you're looking at your traditional fire dump or active shooter or bomb threat, the non-traditional reasons to dump a building or a space, with that technology checking all those perimeter doors, we can now give a true count of how many people are inside of a space, whether that's a skip-side space or a whole museum, for example. And I've been looking for that technology for a long time, and we finally kinda owned in on the right technology that'll give you that very high-level confidence of accounts, so that in that first responder, you can, as a security director or guard, be able to go with your device and say, hey, look, there's still 15 people in my building or 150 people, and actually see a live countdown, which I think is pretty cool, but also very useful real-time data. That's awesome. Let's talk a little bit, you touched on just briefly, let's talk, we've got a few minutes before the break, so let's talk a little bit about fire. How do you work with the existing fire law, and is it working with entrance control and access control, or I mean, I've come across something like infant abduction, things like that, but I'm not sure how you work with fire guys in fire law. Fire can be a bit of a tricky animal, but the real, the bottom line comes down to just, talking to the AHA and the authority having jurisdiction, talk to them, find out what it is that their rub is, what's the problem, what is the thing that they're really concerned about, address that right off the bat, and you're good to go. Awesome. But yeah, that is something that we, there's always a lot of conversation about fire. Yeah, yeah, and it's, Steve, to your point, we've all been, we know we have knowledge of who's in a place, right, and we really wanna be able to give that back at a moment's notice when somebody needs to respond to an active shooter type of event, or whatever, you know, mass casualty, whatever it may be, and that's always been a problem, you know? So it's good, I'm glad to hear that there's been some progress on that front, and you're, are you, do you primarily go to market, like we had Chuck in, you know, GSX is coming up, do you go out to shows and have to educate folks? Do you have to do these locally? How are you approaching the market? Just like that, we do a lot of shows, we're just relaunching our website, we do blogs, we get out and do this as much as possible to educate, when we find the better bounce back track to help explain to people why it's better, how it's better, that it actually functions properly, but yeah, we do a lot of feed on the street work, we do a lot of trade shows, and obviously a lot of internet website type stuff, where we work with FOC, with friends Chuck off, quite frequently, Chuck Andrews and I talk probably, if not daily, but at least weekly. Nice. I like to use him to kind of keep me abreast of what those hot topics are. But also, can I good people the two good things and get stuff done? Absolutely. Yeah, I know he's, that's what friends of Chuck's all about, he talked about some of the plans he has, so that's gonna be a lot of fun for all, it's a great community. Share wise, we talked briefly about some of the retrofit, what's, how much out there is old and in need of replacement? Is it 80%, 90%, 50%, what's your gut tell you? Yeah, yeah, but Mike, I see you kind of, wake one back there, go ahead. There are so many lanes, there are so many lanes, and being, I think probably the only company that has really mastered, Steve, I don't even know, does anyone else even do what we do when it comes to this? As far as the retrofit capabilities go, that's a huge part of the market, that's a huge part of the market, and that's something that we are actively, actively seeking to talk to people about, it's the way we've gotten into a lot of conversations and to the table because we have that capability to do that, and then with the new door guard technology as well to be able to tie those two systems together, it's kind of an unbeatable package. Awesome. You know what I'm saying? Let me tell you, we're gonna jump to a break, Steve, real quick, and we'll be back in about a minute with Steve and Mike from Orion Entrance Controls, gonna pay some bills, hang on. Hey, Stan Energyman 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 gonna keep on doing it. So join me every Friday on Stan Energyman at lunchtime, at noon, on my lunch hour. We're gonna talk about everything energy, especially if it begins with the word hydrogen. We're gonna 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 Stan Energyman. Aloha. 皆さん、こんにちは。 Think Tech Hawaiiが日本語でお届けする。 こんにちは、ハワイの日本語放送のコスト。 くにすえゆかりです。 各州月曜日の2時からお届けしています。 日本語コミュニティー。 ハワイの日本語コミュニティーに 便利なお助け情報、ニュースなどを ゲストを招きしてお届けする番組です。 こんにちは、ハワイ。 各州の月曜日2時から。 ぜひ皆さん見てください。 コストの�香来でした。 Aloha Andrew, security guy here. We're back with olm SD matters in the Think Tech Hawaii studio. We've got Mike, we've got Steve, we've got Orion Interance Controls brain trust right here in the studio with us today. And we're reviewing Interance Controls. If you don't know a lot about it we're going to talk about some of those retro problems is kind of where we left off. And we're going to let Steve kick in with his two cents on that particular topic. How much of that market's out there to be replaced? Yeah. Thank you, Andrew. The reality is the industry is only about 25 years old, maybe 30 years old. So if you think about optical turnstile started, the rumor is or the lore is that it was started with a Wells Fargo application in California with a pure optical non-barrier. That was probably five or six years of the industry and they realized without some type of a barrier, people are just going to keep walking through and causing false alarms. So then the end barrier came out and then the center barrier and then the rest of the world kind of picked up and created different product lines. So when you think about the, we've got a good 20, 25 years of retrofit applications out there. I'd say in the last maybe two or three years, that was a small part of the business, maybe 15, 20 percent, then it hit 50 percent of what we do. Now we still, so the market's actually expanding in need and acceptance, if you will, on top of the retrofit market, so it's really, it's exciting for us as a business, but it's a lot of interesting work. We did one at the World Bank in Washington DC that the original product was built to look like a ship. Wow. Each of the pedestals were kind of shaped like that because they were given that experience, right? So it's really a lot of fun getting to deal with some of those really legacy products, but it's a very large part of what we do today in universities and you mentioned banking earlier today. Give us the, so we went, I think when most of the world, when you say turnstile, they think of the ballpark, right, the big metal turnstile. So can you give us a little bit of how we got from there to here, you know, take a few minutes on just that evolution? Yeah, so I mean that the physical turnstile started off as a field device, literally in a field, a wooden round thing that a person could go through, but a sheep could not or a cow. So if you Google turnstile, you can find that history. It's kind of neat. And then as we started to get into the industrial revolution, dealing with a lot of people going into factories and whatnot, that's where the mechanical turnstile kind of, you know, we call it the egg beater or the cheese grater. The cheese grater mechanical. Yeah. It's got a lot of names. You know, you still see him from a hundred years ago in zoos and then as it became kind of in that market 20, 25 years ago, it became a corporate entity in order to, again, it was primarily about reducing guard staff, but keeping a high level of security. So it's an easy conversation from a return on investment, take away a guard, you pay for the turnstiles in a year or two. Today it's become more of a necessity for leaching space. You know, we're involved with a 200 lane remover in place right now throughout New York and Europe and South America and across the U.S. that is literally about upgrading the lobby's user experience, feeling still, you know, paying homage to the history of the location, but bringing the experience into a consistent model for the, in this case, a building owner that owns a lot of buildings, thankfully. That's awesome. Let's tell you, touched on one thing that people, I don't think understand the problem, throughput. Right? We've got to get 2,000 people in a building. If I've only got one door, probably going to take a while and some of them are going to be late to work because they all show up at 10 to 8 and none of them get the clock until 8.30 because they had a line 2,000 people long. So do you, I'm sure you have throughput considerations in your design. What's the user experience for throughput? What are they sort of, what are they, what's acceptable today? You know, I know in access control, like they, they want to put that card and walk in, you know, they hate it if it takes three seconds to open the door. So tell me what that is on the entrance control side of the house. It's exactly the same with turnstiles. Okay. If they have to wait, they're mad. Something's wrong. Something's wrong. They start pushing on them, beating on them, they're screaming at everybody. So it's got to be quick and working in concert with the technology that's going to be used. That's something that's very important for us. So if someone wants to use a biometric or if they want to use a new type of reader, like the, the, what's that new, Steve, what's that new format, the Seos, right? The Seos. Seos. Seos card job, sure. Historically very slow. Yeah. Sure. So, you know, it's basically a full contact type reader. Yeah. Well, we worked with Essex to create a new reader that would give you read range, that would give you speed, that would up the throughput because a customer wanted to use that technology. But we brought it in-house, looked at it and said, this needs to be better. It's too slow. Because it's too slow. Yeah. It's a lot of technology in there, especially when they're fully encrypted, right? Yeah. Getting on the keys. Absolutely. Yeah. And that, and that's critical. I mean, we're not just going to give somebody something and say, boom, there you go. You know, there's your mouse trap. Yeah. They won't be happy. No. No, no, no. And if there's a problem at the turnstile, it doesn't matter where the problem is. The problem's at the turnstile. Yeah. Because it doesn't, that's what the barrier is, right? Yeah. Absolutely. So throughput is critical. We have to address it. And so on the back end, so that calms downstream, are you guys, you're using OSDP or you rely on like the access control panels to provide that type of technology? I know, you know, C introduced the open supervised data protocol, or device protocol. Is that from that card reader? Are you embedding like other manufacturers access control components or those components that you make? Or how does that work for you? Steve? Yeah. As a manager, we are, we're a door on an access control system. So what makes an optical speed lane work is that we're validating with one credential, one body pass. Right. Right. So we don't get involved in the data transfer from the card reader back to the panel, back to the turnstile. That's completely outside of us. Why not? Okay. To that protocol. We do sit on the network for, you know, for our guard-related software, the infinity software. Okay. So it's either the security officer or the person attending the lobby to see what type of alarms will let guests in, but that's all fairly local. I see. Okay. Nice. So you're working, so pretty much your integration is fairly universal then. You can work with just about any access control manufacturer that's out there. What do you see? Because you mentioned COS, so haven't heard of anyone deploying it yet, which is, I'm glad to hear you've got some forward-looking clients, you know, there's a lot of encryption that's been left on the floor, you know, Matt Barnett and I were talking the other day. I think he thinks 95% of the market's still using 125k prox and unencrypted Wagon protocol. So I'm happy to see, do you see, is there more discussion about that or you run into clients that are interested in upgrading their technology? So you're getting a COS-type card? COS and biometrics. Sorry, Steve, go ahead. Yeah, I was going to say when we were primarily seeing it where the consultants are involved, they're doing that education. It kind of went from, you know, the Wagon to the RP-40 and now to the COS we're seeing in the last six to nine months, pretty much all of the products being specified on TurcSauce have been the COS products. Excellent, excellent. Glad to hear it. Yeah, we're seeing it. Yeah, for sure. And is that a national-level deployment that you're, this is going on across the country? Do you distribute outside the U.S. or only? Oh, global. Global, absolutely. Got you. Yeah. So we're seeing it primarily within the U.S. to date. Excellent, excellent. So let's talk a little bit about being American-made. I love it, American-made company. We don't have that many in the industry. We have, I shouldn't say that, we have some in the industry, but how did it come about? Just give us entrepreneurs, you know, give us the vision to delivery. So Ryan was developed, essentially in my father-in-law's garage, you know, I came back from another business entity that was no longer going to work for us and had a customer that told me we couldn't get out of the business and said, here's the deposit check, go figure it out. Wow. So my wife literally found a desk on the side of the road and we stuck it in the garage and I bought a laptop and a phone and got to work. That's awesome. That's awesome. That's awesome. I love the story. We've got the photos to prove it. Yeah, I do. I do. It'll be on the new website. I can show you later. But so, you know, the decision to be American-made goes back even further than that. I used to own a small security company around the Lakeshore, New Hampshire and we did, you know, everything burger or fire, but we did a lot of the commercial as well. I mean, there's a very large-scale printer company. They make printers that were print billboards. Oh, wow. I've seen techs. They've since been bought and sold a few times, but I did the security in their building and I remember standing up in their training room overlooking a production floor that was probably 20,000 square feet. And I said, someday I'm going to come back to New Hampshire and design a big expensive product that can be shipped anywhere in the world. And I had no idea what that was going to look like, but we just moved into a new office last week, 40,000 square feet. Wow. My office happens to be upstairs. So I was looking over the production floor going, hey, that idea I planted came from an entrepreneurial family. My dad had his own business since he was 17. So I grew up working, you know, started hanging wallpaper and paint, and I was eight. And just got started. So the company's nine years old today, very intentional about being American-made. One of the companies I was a senior manager in previously, I had to sign checks and send money overseas. And that was frustrating. I wasn't allowed to buy shirts for my team at the time, like can I work together? And I'm proud. I don't know if you can see the Orion logo on my shirt right now. Nice. We're in the pin. We're in the pin. So, you know, not only intentional about bringing the business back home here to New England, but also our vendor base is all within an hour of us, our fabrication partners, right down to the PCBs. The PCBs are literally spun up 20 minutes from our facility in New Hampshire. Wow. So we, you know, we really work hard to make sure that to the component level that we're bringing things, you know, keeping jobs in America, you know, there's certainly things Americans aren't the best at making and we do source those, but it's very, very small percentage, maybe 5% of our products. That's awesome. So supporting the local economy. Thank you. The products. Yeah. Absolutely. Now it's a decision and a choice. So it's interesting when we bring that up. It's important to a lot of people, but not as important to some, but we're very proud of that. Awesome. So Orion entrance controls. If you're in the entrance control market, if you want to understand what entrance control is about, check out Orion. They've got a lot of education and a lot of support for the solution that you may need. So another episode we're going to conclude on security matters. Join us again next time. Aloha.