ARCing into IP!

Alan Hyder: With so many technology and regulation changes in the industry have installers found it difficult to keep up?

Dave Roscoe: From the monitoring station point of view we have pretty much kept up with the game if not ahead in some areas, with our own software.

Tony Edwards: One of the unique selling propositions we are proud of is, back in 1997 we developed RAM. (Remote Alarm Management) RAM allows us to give to our customers their information on their alarm system over the intranet. We saw the Internet coming along and grasped that as an opportunity. We give the customers a Secure ID card that gives you access to the Internet in a very secure manor. It means that a customer can log on via the Internet and see their informa-tion, not on the ARC systems but on a mirrored system on a separate sever. They can see what alarms went off last night, what level of police response their system is on. They monitor false alarms and keep track of its performance. Gradually over the years we have developed that into a concept and we put everything we can through RAM – we believe it is the customers’ information and they should have access to it. Now we are in a situation where around 250 national customers are using RAM day-in-day-out, some have three or four staff working on RAM, as part of their security department, looking after their estate.

AH: Does this apply to just alarm monitoring or can it apply to CCTV as well?

TE: They can certainly see all their CCTV activa-tions on the alarm screen. The next stage is when they click on the alarm event they will be able to see what we saw and hear. The next stage as well is when they click on the alarm event they will be able to listen to any telephone calls associated with it. It’s all about openness, a transparency to the customer of what we have said or done. It cuts down on queries on alarm activations, as they can see and hear it for themselves.

We were so impressed with RAM we went onto develop the son of RAM – RAD (Remote Alarm Data). RAD is a cut down version of RAM. What is does is gives the SME or householder access to their data. RAM deals with customers with multiple sites and RAD is for single site use. We do not use a secure ID cards. They come via the Internet, are asked several passwords and secure questions in order to gain access. We have 1500 customers on that. The majority of which are SME’s rather than domestic. Sometime you have a larger customer who will have RAM for the security officer and RAD for the store managers.

AH: Why are you considering and evaluating IP?

TE: We see IP as more secure than existing systems and gives you a range of options. Potential cost advantages with a more open solution.You can use it with your own technology. We also see it for the end-user as speedy and data rich. This means it’s very quick compared to a digi-dialler and you can send a lot more information. The potential is to no longer be constrained to 16 pins. The speed is a real potential but not as great as the extra data we can send. We think it stimulates competition and innovation and fits in very well with our IT skill sets. For the first time, ever, you have a protocol out there that we can deal with and write our own software around. For example we have created an alarm receiver in a day’s work, because you are talking about an open protocol. It will not have all the bells and whistles attached but you could get alarms in and start to present them.

Chris Carter-Brennan: In the standards such as EN it talks about the function you need but actually it should say that the alarm panel application should provide a common interface so you can use any communications platform and format, strang-ling integration at times making it very difficult to interface with a receiver. It not very difficult but its not as easy as it could be.

TE: But once you have the IP communicator or device, actually talking to them over the IP network is relatively easy. The other big factor is, we have been looking at this market for a long time and been talking to our national customers who have invested a lot of money in their own networks. Typically they might have a big WAN 2megabyte into each store and they want to get the maximum out of that network. They want to make their stores IP stores; one major customer wants to make everything in their stores IP based. We’ve been listening to this for quite a time and we have seen a few options starting to take off, the WebWayOne being one.

AH: So is it the customers who are calling the shots and you responding?

TE: I think there is a need there. We’ve seen customers coming along with their IT people, and sometimes it is being driven by the larger customers’ IT people. Generally I think we are tending to drive it, because this technology can span from a large national customer right down to a SME with an ADSL. At the SME level there is not a lot of knowledge and we have to drive it.

DR: Yes, where we have had customers drive it they are looking to reduce their high annual running costs … whereas before we had the barrier of the IT Managers saying “Not on my Network, you’re not running your Intruder system over it”, the Financial Managers are looking and saying “Yes you will if it’s going save me half a million a year.” They have a lot more clout in making the decision.

I think with the growth of ADSL it brought more from the smaller end-user as well.

TE: In the past it was always the security people you spoke to. You never saw the IT people. Now we are meeting the IT manager as well. The last national account meeting we had, the IT manger was there. It’s a start of a new trend.

In the past it was always the security people you spoke to. You never saw the IT people. Now we are meeting the IT manager as well

What you are starting to see is companies such as WebWayOne, with a communications background, coming into the frame and bringing new solutions together.

CCB: One example of this is a major retail supplier, who we cannot name as yet, who will be signing up to both the audio and intruder alarms over IP. So things are moving very quickly now.

TE: It’s interesting as well the not many players coming in with solutions are coming with a communications background.

CCB: We think it’s an advantage. We do come from a background of working service providers and carriers such as BT, Global Crossing, World Com. The requirements to sell to these people and operate on their networks are very, very high and their standards are incredibly high … I hate to say they are higher than the security industry, but they are!

We have had to work with Cisco and Nortel and other big players in the past putting in networks for retailer and banks, which have been real headache environments. Their response times are very stringent, the mode of operation of the network is very high so coming into the alarm industry, we have been there before.

TE: We started off with paper-based evaluated solutions and we ended up doing hardware trials on four solutions, helping us understand and formulate our preferred solution. We had certain pre-conceived ideas about how we thought the comms would work, i.e. we should use TCPIP.

By the time we did our evaluation we had turned around. We thought we wanted the panels to do the polling out which would be better if you set the pole rate from the panels so receiving the poled signal. By the time we did the evaluation we decided it was better to pole from the centre.

It was a very useful process to go through running trails on four different pieces of hardware. At this moment in time WebWayOne is our preferred partner and we see a lot of advantages going with Webwayone.

AH: Going back to RAM Information from CCTV systems, a lot of people are now saying they want a CCTV system to give marketing information, such as what aisle do people shop in the most, what cars do they look at in the showroom. Does RAM have potential for something like that?

TE: There is potential for something like that because again you gain access to your local stores, CCTV over an IP camera system. But if you do have such a system we can consolidate that data on our server here and anyone could look at the information or download it anytime or any place.

We can make available to our customers imagery as seen, so we can turn a camera to look at a display placed so that an image or images can appear on our servers and make it available to anyone who has access to the intranet.

We are now trading as well AM (Advanced Monitoring) for third parties. Mainly to bring more third parties into play. So an installer can utilise RAM to see what is going on his estate and at the moment we are putting together a separate false alarm page that will work out their false alarms record.

Having an IT background ourselves and writing our own ARC strategic software is very important to us. We have a large network of over 1200 employees across 46 locations and a large IT infrastructure to support. It tends to come all together. That’s why I said that it’s a bit of an advantage to us as it fits well into our skill set.

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