ISC West 2017: My Takeaway

• By Sydny Shepard
• Apr 12, 2017

The show is over. The booths are packed up and the product models are placed comfy in their travel boxes home from a long week in ISC West. Tired security manufacturers, integrators and dealers have made it home from Las Vegas, hopefully, now caught up on the much needed sleep most attendees sacrificed at the show.

This year, my second year at ISC West, I was a lot more attentive to the conversations happening around me. These snippets of conversations are the doorway to the future of the security industry. While the products on the show floor represent the present, the subjects of these talks hold insight into what we may see at the show next year.

The topic I heard the most at the show was the partnerships and integrations with smart home brands. While we are already seeing this happen, I believe we will begin to see security companies break away from the big brands of the “smart home” to create a platform all their own.

At one of the booths I visited this year, I asked if they believed the smart home industry was pushing the evolution of the security industry. The man at this booth told me it was the most logical decision to meld smart home and security together. The end user almost expects it to be part of their home already.

While most do not think of automatic thermostats and hue lights to be a part of security, they are definitely sliding into systems that were built to be protective, preventative and valuable to end users looking for security measures.

What do you think? Will we see even more overlap when it comes to the smart home and security industries next year? I think so.