Why PSIM Will NEVER Be Popular

I sat through a few presentations to an airport customer looking to purchase a PSIM. It was a learning experience finding out the separate needs and wants of the various departments who would be the system managers and end users.

The single largest detractor was cost.

Some products focused their pitch heavily on how it could bring multiple systems together and allowed changing of key components later without creating issues with the users. As an example, this airport through the years had two primary access control products installed in quantity and at least three VMS solutions to integrate. As the airport migrated to a single product of each the dependency on integrations would fade somewhat. Some products focused their pitch on how an emergency with a strong work flow and following reporting requirements could be easily managed across required inputs such as elevator, fire, escalator, gates, intrusion, people flow, access control, first responder access and more. Some focused extensively on the reduction of lifecycle training for operators by having a workflow driven common platform. Shorter training cycles and more useful and skilled personnel.

I guess until you have sat in an emergency center dispatch chair with radios and alarm going on a critical event and then had the biggest boss ask for something "NOW" that required pulling data from three systems it's hard to place a value on these things. With that said......they are expensive to install and maintain. A benefit is tying in 10 different systems. That becomes an albatross when you can't/won't/aren't ready to update one system and it holds you back on others or it breaks the system etc.

I love the Van analogy

Great article and had me laughing. Nice way to start the day.

Most of our (bigger) customers want, buy and use our PSIM solutions. With over 400 interfaces to the most common manufacturers in the building technologies field, i do not see any problems - only positive aspects IMO. If you have 10+ subsystems with a whole lot of components and need them to interact based on various scenarios, you can not rely on simple I/Os or such. Furthermore, since many companies are outsourcing security personel, you need a common GUI everybody understands without the use of 10+ different trainings or GUIs.

In the end you have to be flexible - no interface yet? well we or our partner develop it to our customers needs. Function not included? same here.

..a circumstance, maybe none of the smaller integrators are able to or capable of and therefore neglect PSIMs.

Can you clarify, as you did with IDIS and ASIS, what the term's accepted pronounciation is:

1. P-S-I-M
2. P-SIM
3. (P)SIM with the P like (PSychology)

How many crimes prevented, how many arrests made? These are simple enough metrics for establishing PSIM value. Where is the proof?

The above is simply one example. There are obviously various iterations of multi-tiered integrations using many types of systems depending on the End-User customer.

John brings up a good point about huge investments in lots of systems where some EUers need to develop easier methods to "monitor". I certainly agree that the PSIM models have there place with a very select type of customer. However, they have to recognize the long term affects of their decision as the cost of the back-end support and administration may actually be much more than spending the money to invest in a product that could potentially minimize the number and levels of integration required.

NICE (or the company formerly known as NICE) is campaigning against the term PSIM now:

“PSIM is not the right term for where we’re heading; PSIM is the wrong terminology for the right technology,” he says. “Until the industry comes up with a better term, there will continue to be confusion about what PSIM is and isn’t. I wouldn’t be surprised if a new term emerged within the next six to 12 months.”

I like this article as it touches on a lot of key points that I've been dealing with over the last 4-5 years. And I agree that the word PSIM is thrown around loosely without thought. That beings said, we've successfully deployed a PSIM platform and is currently integrated and running, connected to 27 different sub-systems from CCTV, ACS to Elevators, Escalators and even controlling lock-boxes for tender documents.

The product we're using is probably the most expensive, but is of them all the most expandable and customize-able one out there. IPSecurityCenter by CNL is the product we're using and we also create our own in-house driver base to connect to almost ANYTHING.

The KEY thing in doing so is proper project and sub-system management. This touches on something mentioned earlier around "Version Management". At first this was our biggest headache as sub-system vendors would come on site maintaining their equipment and upgrading software willy-nilly causing driver incompatibility. However we caught this issue early on and could establish corporate policy for change-control to avoid this.

Running and maintaining it is a full-time job and requires a lot of continuous communications with the end-user to provide the information (the "I" in PSIM) that he/she NEEDS, not wants. A PSIM platform that does not change during its lifetime is now a big white elephant. If your PSIM platform doesn't allow for these changes, you've invested in the wrong product.

The biggest benefits we've achieved with our deployment are:
> Less operators to train to monitor the vast amount of sub-systems
> Expose sub-system maintenance flaws
> Speed up maintenance procedures by passing info directly into ERP Plant Maintenance Applications (like SAP)
> Expose lazy operators
> Manage security staff
> Minimize false alarms (consolidating different sub-system events as a single true alarm rather than creating alarm instances for each sub-system event)
> Many more

In the end it's how you drive it and how willing you are to manage and maintain it.