Blub0x Claiming "Over Weekend System Take Over"

This is interesting, thank you for sharing it.

In terms of 'database conversion', there are smaller databases of a few hundred users so garbaged out, it takes many hours of cleanup and scrubbing before conversion.

Big dbases take more time.  So that point is highly variable.

And in terms of Mercury's 'Open Architecture', there needs to be a disclaimer that just because some features and functionality are supported among Mercury partners, not all of them are guaranteed to be.

User training is another issue.  Getting everyone who uses a system together for scheduled training can be hard to pull off, no matter how complex/simple the parent application may be.

As much as we'd like to keep on thinking that the EAC (North America) market won't be as easy to enter for a Hikvision-like company who can turn out door controllers at a fraction of the cost of Mercury if they decided to .........  

Long story short --- the odd situation of so many main-line EAC companies relying on Mercury has been in the sights of some Chinese manufacturers for a few years now, but so far their platforms would require a rip and replace of the Mercury boards anyway (as opposed to being able to  "co-exist" in the same system).

So, the real strategy would be for them to convince one EAC company and then another and then one another of the EAC companies to work with them to make it so the new boards can co-exist with the existing Mercury on the same system so that rip and replace is not required and new doors can get new "Brand Jupiter" boards and the EAC software looks at them just like they are Mercury boards.

The happy hunting ground is/has been video for so long so the ROI for disruption has been in cameras/VMS, but sooner or later the attention may shift over to EAC.  

So much of the US Government/Federal EAC business is wrapped up in Lenel, Software House (non-Mercury), and AMAG (non-Mercury) that it would be difficult for a Hikvision-like company to invisibly break into the Federal EAC market, but the general commercial market would/could be a target.

The telecom/IT Infrastructure/networking contractors that are making life wonderful for companies like Axis and Avigilon don't really want to get their hands dirty with access controls as yet, so there are still a lot of business/technology reasons why access control still is a bit of a mystery to those folks.  

I think this contributes to the general laziness of EAC companies to develop innovative hardware and just OEM Mercury-based controllers so they also don't have to "get their hands dirty" with the hardware manufacturing side and just concentrate on software/GUI.

I think there will be some disruption in the wireless/BLE area with regards to trying to eliminate some of the required wiring/install labor around an opening as well as eliminating the old fashioned need for issuing card-like credentials.  Like all other new technology, adoption of new is always held up by the "big guys" that don't have it yet.

I agree with what you said about mechanical keys/locks being around for 500 years .... as long as the oldest technology still works and is still the least expensive and easiest to use, there is a a huge compelling reason for that technology to still be used.

Since door hardware still has to endure the daily pounding of human interaction with it (thinking of panic hardware and such that people wear and tear on daily) the relative high cost of it is somewhat justified and expected.  I'm not so sure we'll ever see a race to the bottom with door hardware.  That leaves the electronics, which in real terms is just a part (sometimes a small part) of the total cost to control/secure an opening. I guess this is one of the main factors that makes door control a more difficult target for low cost EAC products.

For the small/medium commercial market though, the wireless/BLE communicating EAC products could be well received since the installation labor and wiring costs can be much lower than a traditional EAC install.

It's important to remember the Mercury produces a component of an EAC system, the door controller, and not the full system itself.  Taking-over a system involves far more than the door controller hardware.  The fact that a company supports Mercury hardware does not have anything to do with how they designed their database, badging, video, etc., and these things take the lion's share of time in any takeover scenario.

Also, bear in mind that after the features for access control "basics", there are many higher-level features that are not used by everyone (e.g. 2-man rule, escort, wireless lockset integration).  No single parter uses all of these features, but all partners use some of them.  For example, only one Mercury partner supports the combination of Allegion/Schlage lockets, Intrusion, and "exception" access rights features in a single product.  I suspect those sites are pretty safe from takeover.  I could think of dozens more combinations that only one or two Mercury partners have.

Mercury is a platform on which others build access control products, and the logic flows from that.  For example, just because two apps are built in .NET doesn't mean they're inherently compatible.  The bottom line is that suspect that an important reason people choose Mercury, is because they need at least one of those features beyond basic access.  This is an important caveat to consider during takeovers.

(Disclosure: I worked at Mercury for several years)