Hard Work, Lots of Colour

There are several key differences between tradeshows in the United States and the United Kingdom. Spelling is one. But here on Day 1 at IFSEC, traffic at the show is a bit sparse. That could be why IFSEC is held four days straight.

Days 1 and 4 are for warm up and cool off, but the two days in between are serious business. There are also fire, and health and safety tradeshows collocated at the NEC Birmingham. Thousands of participants have made their way to the hall floors.

The first day of IFSEC was a great day for me as I have been able to visit with manufacturers and exhibitors without wading through the crowds. Today will be different with the torrent of attendees.

What I’ve noticed here today is that the show floor is smaller than last year, and booth sizes, in general, are smaller than those at ISC West or ASIS. The volume of business, however, is at a frenzied pace.

Pivot3 has introduced its vBank appliance, which addresses the growing influence of IT in video surveillance environments. This adds resources to support more virtual servers, solid state disk drives to extend storage performance across general business applications and bundles VMware vCenter Server technologies to simplify management.

SALTO Systems has released a number of access control systems at IFSEC, including the SALTO global electronic opening cylinder and an RFID designer lock that can be opened with a near-field communications-equipped smart phone.

I’m looking forward to learning more about security in the United Kingdom today, and how security is changing the lives of our neighbors on the other side of the Atlantic. It’s been an interesting tradeshow thus far, in fact, last night after dinner in the home town of Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon; I bumped into Ed Davis, co-founder and vice president of marketing with AFI.

I also met up with Tony Byerly and Felix Gonzalez of Stanley Convergent Security Systems who manage part of their U.S.-based business in the United Kingdom. It’s always good to see friendly faces from home. Home, of course, being the United States.

I’m looking forward to the events of the day and reporting more for tomorrow.

About the Author

Ralph C. Jensen is the Publisher of Security Today magazine.

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