Cisco Serves Notice

• By Steven Titch
• Jul 23, 2007

Bill Jacobs, senior risk technology manager, for Cisco Systems foresees a time when an access system can, in real time, print a photo on a visitor badge from an image off a PTZ camera pointed at the front entry desk.

It’s Jacob’s job, as senior risk technology manager at Cisco, to devise ways to bring physical security and IP networking together.

Cisco is all about IP networking. While most vendors have embraced IP (or surrendered to its inevitability), Cisco aims to take use IP to refashion the enterprise security concept from the ground up.

Cisco doesn’t enter a business unless it can disrupt existing technology, especially proprietary technology, says Guido Jouret, vice-president and chief technology officer for Cisco’s Emerging Technologies Group. In 2006 Cisco identified the physical security sector as one of what will ultimately be 15 new business areas from which it aims to derive $6.5 billion in revenue growth in the coming years.

Cisco’s recent acquisitions of BroadWare, a manufacturer of IP-based video management systems, and SyPixx Networks, which makes software and hardware that integrate analog surveillance cameras into digital IP networks, are part of this thrust.

Cisco aims to maximize the potential of security and IP convergence, helping customers not only migrate legacy video surveillance and access control systems to an IP backbone, but use the IP backbone to link those systems into building management systems, remote monitoring, lighting, heating and air conditioning.

Some of this technology is already on display for visitors to its physical security/emergency response operations building located on its corporate campus in San Jose, Calif.

“We drink the Kool-Aid,” says Jouret of the technology solutions Cisco sells. For example, when an employee cards in, his or her name and picture will be displayed on a large video screen. This same digital signage is located throughout the building, displaying information on visitors and daily events. In case of emergency, the signage will provide instructions to specific areas in specific buildings. If there’s a fire, only workers in the affected building may be advised to evacuate. Employees in other buildings will be instructed to stay put so emergency responders can focus on the situation.

Cisco maintains two state-of-the-art security control centers, one in San Jose, the other in Research Triangle Park. Both monitor and control the nearly 7,000 card readers and 2,900 surveillance cameras at 503 buildings worldwide. Each control center can tie into operations at any building. If an employee at a remote Cisco office places a 911 call, in addition to being routed to a local public service answering point (PSAP), and a third party connection will be set up with one of the security operations centers.

But beyond emergency response, Jacobs sees other applications where IP networking, video and video analytics, and building control systems can work together to provide a safe, comfortable working environment.

For example, most buildings program their heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems power down at night. Jacobs suggests energy costs could be better managed if the HVAC system could rely on inputs from video analytics and card entry data in order to process information about whom, if anyone, was in the building. If a particular work group was working late, for instance, the HVAC could use the data from video cameras and card swipes to maintain a comfortable working temperature on the floor where the group was working, and power down air conditioning elsewhere. Similarly when an employee stops by the office on a weekend and swipes his card, the access system will inform the building lighting system of his identity, the lighting system will query the IT database to determine the location of the employee’s workstation, and then, matching data on the identity of the employee and his workspace, activate a lighting path to his desk.

“We’re taking all of the individual building systems, translating their languages and normalizing it on IP,” says Jacobs. “Then we’re writing rules. The idea is to use the IP connectivity to create business rules you can define on your own, then take a wide variety of solution sets and create business efficiencies out if that.”