When looking back 15 years ago, all the buzz in the security industry was clear; access control software and digital IP video software will integrate, essentially becoming one solution. It’s interesting to see now how this has all played out. In 2005, Milestone Systems announced at a conference in Savanna, Georgia, that they will offer integration for Middleware Associates’ Edge Responder software that was developed specifically for the line of HID EDGE PoE controllers and readers. Well, it never happened, mainly because our customers, at that time, rarely went beyond 20 readers and on average around 10 cameras.

The technology in 2005 did not allow for a proactive approach, in other words, if an event happened, everything was reactive. For example, if a laptop was stolen in the engineering lab, the customer would go back and look at the access control events of the entry and exit doors of the lab on the days they thought the laptop was stolen. This would give them at least a starting point showing which employees were in the room around the time of the theft. Then they would review the video based on the access control event time stamps. In 2005, the price of integration simply outweighed the benefits.

Fast forward to 2020, and we now truly see the benefits of integration but only for large enterprises where they have an IP camera at every access point, thus allowing them to see the associated video stream with every access control event. So what has happened in the past 15 years that justifies the benefits of integration? Firstly, Video Management Software is now using video analytics and AI to define alarms or trends that may be of concern; in other words, we can now take proactive steps as opposed to reactive steps 15 years ago. As IP video cameras continue to offer more features and VMS solutions continue to improve their algorithms, we will continue to see substantial growth of integration with large, enterprise-level customers.