Security Center 5.7, the latest version, allows users to make insight-driven decisions based on security and analytics data. Security Center 5.7 now automatically identifies edge devices and cameras that need firmware updates, helping assure network protection, integrity, and ‘Security of Security’. Privacy Protector is certified with the European Privacy Seal (EuroPriSe) and ‘GDPR-ready’, providing image blurring and pixelization with encryption to assure privacy and compliance. A new efficient distribution feature with HID mobile access control credentials ensures business continuity with native access control failover and mobile HID credentials management. Security Center 5.7 is available now through the global network of Genetec certified channel partners.

“In 2017, we witnessed an increase in cyber-attacks, privacy breaches, and poorly-designed software and equipment,” said Firas Jadalla, Regional Director of Sales for Middle East, Turkey, Africa, Genetec Inc. “At Intersec Dubai, Genetec is keeping the conversation going to urge its integrators and customers to establish trusted best practices that can keep its people and organizations safe and secure. Genetec Security Center 5.7 addresses these concerns head on by offering unmatched levels of authentication, encryption, and authorization—in a unified platform,” added Jadalla.

With an intuitive interface built on Genetec Security Center, Citigraf, the Public Safety Decision Support System collects, manages, and correlates information provided by integrated CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) systems, CCTV footage, ALPR data, RMS (Record Management Systems) and more. This system helps law enforcement and security dispatch operators immediately identify and display the exact location of an event using icons on a map from a built-in geographical information system (GIS).

Marking Genetec’s first-time participation at the event, the company will be throwing the spotlight on three of its leading offerings—Access Control, Security Center and Mission Control—and help increase more awareness on the significance of these new solutions in the efforts to maintain safety and security across the daily operations of today’s businesses.

Genetec Security Center is the company’s open architecture offering and flagship IP-based unified security platform. Through Security Center, customers can benefit from its scalability, simple platform and variety of key features for both video and access control, including consolidated reporting and alarm management.

Genetec Mission Control is a powerful holistic management solution that has been designed and developed to bring multiple sub-systems into a single coherent inherent interface providing situational awareness and centralized operational response. The solution helps in simplifying an operator’s tasks and decision-making process when handling routine activities and undesirable situations.

Security Center Synergis is the company’s latest IP access control system (ACS) offering that helps heighten the security of an organization and increases its readiness to respond to incidents and threats, all while leveraging any existing network and security equipment investments.

“We are excited to participate for the first time at this year’s edition of Cairo ICT, which reflects Egypt’s position as a significant player in the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region’s rapidly thriving ICT segment. The event proves to be both timely and strategic as it will serve as the perfect platform for us to increase more brand awareness and help educate people on the many benefits and advantages to be gained from using our diverse portfolio of solutions. During the show, we will be leveraging three of our most in-demand solutions–Access Control, Mission Control and Security Center, which are essential tools that can provide your company or organization with the confidence of safety and security across your day-to-day operations,” concluded Firas Jadalla, Regional Director, Middle East and Africa.

This year’s edition of Cairo ICT will feature roundtable discussions, presentations and keynote speeches from leading industry experts, thought leaders and tech gurus covering the latest digital trends and breakthroughs in the global ICT arena. The Genetec stand will be located at Hall No. 1, of the exhibition center.

Solutions offering enhanced functionalities including analytics are driving higher adoption rates

Physical security has continued to be a vibrant segment in the region and the growth in demand is expected to come from need for solutions offering enhanced functionalities in surveillance to analytics. With better capabilities built in, these are now helping able to expand the scope of their utility in dealing with most use case scenarios from perimeter security to traffic management, retail analytics, edge analytics, city surveillance etc.

Marwan Khoury, Regional Marketing Manager, Axis Communications says, “Axis expects 2017 to be the year when new camera capabilities are combined with real-time analytics to address several security challenges, including facial recognition, forensic analysis and perimeter protection. This is critical as according to IHS, by 2020, network camera sales are forecast to account for approximately 95% of total worldwide security camera sales, compared to approx. 80% in 2015.”

He adds that while there is slowdown anticipated in the UAE, there is a possibility that in KSA, many projects could be on hold.

A recent report from leading global analysts Frost & Sullivan has shown that spending in the physical security market of the Middle East region has increased and is expected to reach USD 10.2 billion in the next four years—making up at least 10 per cent of the global market.

Firas Jadalla, Regional Director – Middle East and Africa, Genetec says, “Genetec performed excellently in 2016, which is evident in its continued growth. Last year’s positive performance has given us the confidence to look towards further expanding our market presence in the Middle East and living up to our commitment to offer world-class unified IP security solutions across this diverse region. In line with this, we are currently expanding in Turkey by hiring additional resources.”

He adds, “The positive growth that we are experiencing has prompted us to venture into expanding our presence across the region. The move demonstrates our aim to move from being a ‘video security’ company to a company that provides its customers with intelligent insight that can be used across cities, airports, retail and business environments, schools and government offices.”

The region continues to be one of the most vibrant when it comes to growth in demand for surveillance solutions. Therefore, the region continues to attract the attention of many vendors who have set up and consolidated their local operations.

Ashwin Amarapur, Director & CEO of AllGoVision Technologies Pvt Ltd says, “AllGoVision has been able to establish a very emphatic presence in Middle East and thus Middle East has become one of our major markets. The business has grown 200% in the past one year and we have a dedicated Sales and Support Team based at Dubai specifically for the MENA region. We have been able to add many SIs and Channel Partners and are focusing on further expansion through more SIs/ Partners. Our Support team provides frequent demos and training along with Installations. We can provide remote Support from India as well as On-site support anywhere in the region.”

The UAE has positioned itself as the region’s leading retail hub, with a recent study by the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry forecasting Dubai’s retail sector in particular to touch AED 200 billion in 2017 and expand at an average of 5 per cent annually. The retail data gathered from the Genetec retail intelligence application will enable marketing, operation and merchandising staff of boutique-style stores or large multi-site retailers to improve their customers’ experiences and impact in-store profitability by increasing consumer engagement.
Genetec Retail Intelligence will help retailers gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior, needs and preferences to build a more personal relationship by analyzing and correlating information gathered from multiple sensors such as video surveillance cameras and point-of-sale systems. With powerful analytics such as queue management, heat mapping, directional analysis, people counting and conversion rate analytics, the application can notify staff in real-time to respond to shoppers in the store or in a particular section. It will also inform them about long lines on check-out lanes or changing rooms so that the necessary staff can be reassigned. Marketing and merchandising professionals can use the information provided by the application to design new promotions and optimize inventory strategies from within a single interface.
“There is a wealth of information collected by security systems that has gone virtually untapped until now,” said Derek Arcuri, Product Marketing Manager for Genetec Retail Intelligence. “Our Genetec Retail Intelligence application will help retailers not only gain insights into store performance and customer buying patterns, but will generate powerful analytics-driven intelligence, delivered in a format that can be easily understood, interpreted and shared. Genetec Retail Intelligence will be available via a cost-effective subscription basis that will work with a wide variety of camera brands, and will not require complex and expensive additional equipment,” added Arcuri.

“Retail is a key pillar of the UAE’s economic diversification strategy and we extend our support to the country’ retail industry by presenting our latest application that can provide valuable data on customer behavior to retailers. Genetec will throw the spotlight on its video surveillance application and how it can be leveraged for some powerful real-time in-store intelligence that can improve and impact sales and customer experiences. With a user-friendly customizable dashboard, Genetec Retail Intelligence will provide real time insights as well as in-depth analytics based on activity patterns over time. It can be easily accessed by any Internet-enabled device, allowing retailers to stay connected regardless of where they are located,” concluded Firas Jadalla, Regional Director – Middle East and Africa, Genetec.

Genetec Retail Intelligence is designed to be infinitely scalable and optimized to easily interpret data from a multitude of stores—from small franchise operations to large-scale retail chains. Information gathered from multiple stores in different locations will be available for comparison across locations, giving retailers a greater understanding of their entire business operations.

With a new disaster recovery mode that allows the configuration of multiple failover directory servers at remote sites, Security Center 5.5 allows customers to implement more elaborate disaster recovery plans for their security platform. In the event of a disaster, failover servers at geographically disparate location can immediately take control and ensure organizations continue to have access to their security platform and protect their people and assets.

Offering a powerful yet efficient user experience remains a paramount driver for Security Center development. In this latest release, map-centric monitoring offers enhanced, fluid map scaling for zooming effortlessly in and out of maps—from floorplans to satellite imagery—along with the option to geo-reference dynamic objects on a map with actual geographic coordinates for greater awareness, and add new map layers. With map layering, operators can add or remove details from a map in real-time to narrow or broaden visualization of a site. To further simplify alarm management, Security Center 5.5 features alarm grouping and filtering so that operators can group alarms visually by type, state, or priority, as well as handle entire collections of alarms, such as acknowledging or forwarding an entire group.

As part of a continuous effort to grow its ecosystem of technology partners and facilitate integration to Security Center, Genetec offers two flavors of its Software Development Kit (SDK). The Basic SDK is a freely-available package used to connect to Security Center and access configuration information, events and alarms in real-time, as well as make changes or add new tasks to the monitoring client app. A simplified online enrollment and acceptance process, that is largely automated, gives users quick access. An advanced SDK package offers all the elements of the Basic SDK with access to additional tools required by more complex integrations, and is available through Genetec certified channel partners.

Building on the advanced cybersecurity measures introduced in Security Center 5.4, and the company’s ongoing commitment to ‘Security of Security’, version 5.5 offers a ‘hardened’ protocol that protects against potential hacking and non-authorized internal access. When users request to access video feeds, new authentication and authorization steps are in place to protect video data and privacy. By default, only secured media stream requests are accepted, ensuring the app or person making the request is authenticated to avoid any unauthorized requests. Token-based authentication is applied for authorizing and authenticating RTSP video requests, TLS encryption for securely transmitting these user authentication tokens, and RTSP over TLS for another level of video stream encryption while in transit.

Security Center 5.5 also offers users the ability to finely manage exported or saved content, such as video clips and snapshots, which facilitates modifications prior to sharing inside or outside an organization. Examples include the blurring and masking of snapshots to protect privacy, editing saved video clips to remove either sensitive or less valuable content and then re-exporting the final clips, adding new bookmarks to better qualify a recorded scene, and more. Sharing is made simpler by exporting video to the widely used MP4 format so as to leverage common off-the-shelf video players and eliminate the need for proprietary video players.

Security Center 5.5 also features new access control capabilities to improve organizational security, protect sensitive information, and increase customers’ choice of access control hardware.

Through the support of the latest firmware running on the Synergis Cloud Link appliance alongside Mercury Security controllers, organizations are able to extend the reach of their security platform with Allegion Schlage AD-300 Hardwired and AD-400 Wireless electronic locks. Organizations can also unify controller-based and electronic lock-based security systems in the process for a more inclusive approach to access control.

Security Center 5.5 introduces Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications between Synergis Cloud Link appliances enabling global IO linking and global antipassback. Even when connectivity to the server is unavailable, Synergis Cloud Link appliances have the intelligence to share information across the network, like inputs triggering outputs across appliances and by extending the functionality of antipassback to areas managed by multiple appliances. This added flexibility enables users to move away from relying on constant connection to the server that improves overall security.

For greater protection of confidential and sensitive data, additional means of encrypting communications have been implemented between the Synergis Cloud Link appliance and the server along with numerous industry-leading Genetec access control hardware partners, including Mercury Security (EP controllers) and Assa Abloy (IP locks). The primary goal is to ensure secure communications throughout a customer’s entire access control infrastructure.