The pace of change is so intense in the technology powered security industry, that you have to actively look out for new and exciting developments, you have to make contact with people and ask questions, or else you’ll be left behind. We can all agree that COVID was an isolating time, and for many people 2023 is the year of in-person meet-ups. So that’s exactly what we did. We recently met up with the Avigilon team in Paarl at their demo room to catch up and see what’s new. I don’t know if it was the coffee we had when we got there (shoutout to Jackson and Black Coffee Shop for the friendly service), or the tech we were viewing, but we were buzzing with excitement. It’s always great to get out of the office for a road trip morning.
Now into the nitty gritty. We got chatting about fantastic new developments in access control, and specifically contactless access control. South Africa still heavily utilises physical touch biometrics, but we were shown how the world is fast integrating the use of secured biometric smartphone apps to use facial recognition as a more secure means of access control.
We were then shown the latest Avigilon camera models set to be released in the coming months, and were graciously given one to test out. With an open API, these cameras have massive integration capabilities, and they’ve also been designed with future standards in mind in ways that prevent some of the most common means of damage to the devices. And with some cameras featuring omni-directional audio inputs, Avigilon’s software is able to listen out for, and accurately detect things such as gunshots or glass breaking!
We were then shown how useful mapping software can be! From real-time heatmaps of traffic, people, bicycles, you name it with the right tech you can visualise it. With mapping integration with Google maps, and the ability to upload property schematics into the mapping software, it’s incredibly easy to see in real-time which cameras are active, which have alerts, and the direction the trigger is moving. The ability of the software to drill down the exact search parameters quickly and effectively was also astounding. The user-friendly search interface allowed us to search for us entering the building based on the colour pants and shirts we were wearing. The tracking and tracing functionality for humans, and all manner of vehicles is next level.
We’d like to thank JP for taking the time to demo these exciting new developments, and for the years of channel partnership.
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