Standards Here To Stay
- By Brent Dirks
- Mar 26, 2010
With dueling plugfests drawing standing room only crowds Thursday during the second day of ASIS, it is pretty obvious that standardization is here to stay for IP-based security.
The PSIA Alliance had its plugfest first in Las Vegas and showed off an area control proof of concept technical demo. A specification was promised by ASIS.
Before then, the alliance announced that it will be releasing a video analytics draft specification for public comment in April. The specification defines a standard way to output, receive, store and use video analytic event output.
I also got a chance to sit down and talk with Tom Hulsey, director of field Operations with Cyber Group USA.
The Lewisville, Texas police department wanted to install video surveillance in ‘pain points’ in the police department and jail cells, areas that have typically been hard to install at because of a number of factors – including drilling for networking cable.
Cyber Group specializes in interesting technology, instead of the ubiquitous Power over Ethernet, the company’s technology uses Ethernet networking through power lines.
Because the city already has a surveillance system, it posed a problem.
“The IT department told us that we like your technology, but it’s got to integrate with our current system and the Milestone technology,” Hulsey said.
After realizing that instead of having Milestone to write a custom API for the company’s technology, Cyber Group turned to the PSIA standards to integrate quickly with the city’s current video surveillance system.
“Lewisville has been very pleased with the installation,” Hulsey said. “As far as we know, we’re the first company, whether PSIA or ONVIF to do a real-world build out by integrating with the standards.”
And at the ONVIF event, another packed house took a look at technology from member companies.
Jonas Andersson, ONVIF Chairman’s from Axis Communications, announced that ONVIF currently has 172 members and 40 conformant products. ONVIF members currently account for 72 percent of the market.
The big news from ONVIF, beyond announcing that version 2.0 of its core specification will be forthcoming this year, is that the body is planning to extend its standards to access control.
“We really decided to extend to access control because of the interest from members,” Andersson said. “There are a lot of integrated systems that have video and access control, and this will help to make it easier to integrate those systems.”
I’ve got a short day Friday, but look for more from me in the ISC West Network-Centric Security newsletter next week.
About the Author
Brent Dirks is e-news/Web editor for Security Products and Network-Centric Security magazines.