"My main prediction for 2013 is the separation of PSIM vendors in to classic market segments. At the high end those whose solutions truly scale, like CNL’s, will put major distance from those who rely on 3rd party products for high availability/disaster recovery for example, or those who do not offer load balancing or need to turn off their solutions to do updates. Mission critical systems just have to be “Always On”, which we believe to be a core component of an Enterprise PSIM solution moving forward.

Another prediction is Federation; the ability to connect multiple systems, at a large site or multiple security control rooms around the globe to create one holistic “Shield”, will be particularly important for large scale global corporate operations. This type of solution will allow multiple sources of alarm handling, remote management and the connection of operations to reduce cost, improve efficiency and bring greater visibility to the entire operation. It is important that federated systems are not just seen as failover solutions, but as systems that are able to hand off operations to another centre whenever needed. Using a federated system to create a “follow the sun” solution might mean that a control centre in India could monitor UK operations overnight; reducing the need for night staff in attendance on site, unless there was an event that required it. It also allows global management of widespread security risks and disasters.

We also expect the emergence of IT Integrators in to the physical security space, mainly being responsible for the deployment of large scale, complex PSIM projects, but working together with security SI’s who do not currently have the required skills in house. These “collaborative” partnerships have been around in IT for a long time, but they are now winning deals in the PSIM space. Within these partnerships, they are also likely to write their own drivers for sub-systems or data connections, using development tools like our Driver Development Kit. We predict that even manufacturers will start producing drivers in order to connect to PSIM systems, although a number of the larger ones are implementing PSIA interoperability, allowing PSIM to connect using a standard driver.

Greater deployment of PSIM intelligence - 2013 will see end users giving greater focus to what they can do better with the knowledge they already have. We are excited about the way large scale transportation projects are now looking to PSIM vendors to provide the “smarts” in and out of the control room. We are working on tasks like “follow that train”, using core destination data to automate camera views from station to station. This is equally true in ports or airports, where arrival data can trigger standard operating procedure, taking the responsibility away from the operator by pushing the intelligence into the system. Managing multiple analytics solutions will be a de facto standard and rules based workflow will be required.

The market will recognize the ROI of advanced video export; a one click solution to gather all video related to an incident, which removes the need for the operator to reach into each of the native video recording systems. This feature coupled with video analytics enables intelligent searches around defined parameters, further reducing evidence collection times. When clients have 50,000+ cameras in a single connected system, live viewing can only be an option if triggered by an event; in the future most investigations will be run by automated process outside the control room.

In 2013 we see more customers requiring this level of intelligence, which ensures faster processing of evidence, essential for large scale applications as they rely less on live views and more on forensics. In this way, they get the evidential data faster, cheaper, more reliably and from a greater number of sources. PSIM is really coming of age, reducing operating costs, speeding up evidence management, improving emergency preparedness and managing increasingly complex, mission critical security environments."