After returning from ASIS, vendors like ourselves often take a look back to measure the success of all the various initiatives that go into planning for the show such as onsite events, newly developed demos, and a multitude of other marketing efforts, paying special attention to any new initiatives!
For us, a new initiative this year was our Incident Command Center or ICC… which in review was a hugely successful venture into a second PPM booth of sorts, located in a meeting room on the show room floor just a short jaunt away from the main PPM booth.
Our largest growth in recent years has been our venture into the command center market, where integrated incident management software plays a huge role. We have been involved in some really cool, really large, enterprise level command center deployments and wanted to show the world (well, the ASIS world) what we can do now and our plans for the future, especially since we’d just announced our new Integrated Solutions Division with the launch of the show.
The idea for the ICC sprung from the current PPM booth. At the back of our main booth we have a large glassed in meeting area that is staged to show integrations with Perspective including access control, video management, and other systems.
In recent years, this was always my favorite area of our booth however, I wanted it bigger… MUCH BIGGER. Having seen our software used in some amazing security operations centers, I wanted to try and portray that same feeling on the show floor. The only problem was, I needed about 400 sq feet of space and we were not going to give up that much real estate from our main booth. So, we came up with the idea to rent one of the 20×20 meeting spaces in the back of the hall and turn it into an Incident Command Center. Awesome!
OK… reality… it’s an empty space we needed to fill to look like a true to life security operations center. Call in the PPM partner network! We brought in access control (AMAG, Brivo, Lenel), video (Avigilon, Pelco), emergency notifications (Guardly, MIR3), and lined up a PSIM type integration and event handling company (SureView Systems). Of course, we included Microsoft Global Security as our reference partner including a ‘live view’ into their Global Security Operations Center – Americas. Very cool! Now that all partners were in play and connected together, the next step was working on the visuals.
Clearly, we needed big screens and a command staging area—a table was just not going to cut it. So, we reached out to our control room console partners at Winsted who supplied us with a command desk and monitor racks as used in live command centers. OK… now we’re talkin’.
We had the vision, the partners, and now the furniture…
The floorplan… the desk… the back drop (the famous PPM Command & Control background)!
So, after months of planning, creating, booking, scripting, and many other facets, all teams came together September 29th at the 60th Annual ASIS International Seminar and Exhibits for the launch of the PPM Incident Command Center. Before any traffic hit the floor, almost set to go, we were darn close to the vision. We were just missing some partner banner stands, and some last minute clean up!
We had four main presentations scheduled for the week and we were hoping for a good response. What we instead received was an AMAZING response.
We had room for 10 people seated, but with each session we were over capacity and had to squeeze in upwards of 20 people. In most cases we were packed wall to wall, and in the last two sessions, attendees were out the door to the point they could barely see in. Here’s a shot of our Tuesday AM session with Josh Sookman, founder of Guardly, giving a demo of their emergency notification with indoor positioning system working seamlessly with Perspective’s Dispatching component.
In the first shot below, note the background banner stand… adding that hidden aspect of high tech cool! Can you spot what’s not the same in the second picture?
Hint… check out the shirt! All demos started with us wearing our famous PPM team hockey jerseys and ended in our PPM Incident Command Center t-shirts. We had a PPM Team jersey as the main giveaway for the week, and in each individual session, we gave away an ICC t-shirt to one person. In addition, every attendee also received a free scholarship pass to the Great Conversation East in Virginia… a $1200.00 value.
So who is in command? Well, at ASIS, it seemed everyone was in our Incident Command Center, and we set the stage for what you can expect from PPM as your partner in end-to-end integrated incident management. From vision to reality, our ICC came to life. We’re thankful for the cross traffic from our main PPM booth where we showcased our Perspective V4.5 release with our enhanced Analysis Expert, new Custom Report builder, and our high tech cool geospatial Mapping feature (or for Frank and Elaine, ‘pin mapping’). Just all around high tech cool at ASIS this year.
What did we hope to prove? Simple… when you think ‘incident management’, think PPM. I am pretty sure we accomplished this. Just as Elaine ended her ASIS 2014 review post—the countdown to ASIS 2015 in Anaheim is on!
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