Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/31501
8 NEWS www.securitysystemsnews.com APRIL 2011 SECURITY SYSTEMS NEWS Name: Thomas L. Norman, CPP Name of company: Protection Partners International (PPI) I know that you’re the author of several books. In your 2006 book, you wrote about micro-controllers, which at the time no one was mak- ing. You said that one major manu- facturer closely based certain devices on what you describe in the book. Is it important to you to get your product ideas out in the public? Why? It’s very important to me. After nearly 35 years in the security indus- try, and nearly 30 years as a consul- tant, I have believed that the chal- lenge of security is not technology, Thomas Norman it is a challenge of imagination. The security manufacturing industry is still thinking about 900 years before astrology. I’m currently encouraging digital video manu- facturers to dynamically request exactly the resolution from cam- eras according to the number of pixels they will fill on the screen. Hey look, the camera will deliver whatever resolution you ask of it. Display a camera full screen: give us full resolution, automatically. Display 16 cameras on a screen, give us something closer to QCIF, automatically. This solves several problems. For one, it vastly improves the use of bandwidth. When a camera is not displayed, it will deliver absolutely no bandwidth on the live stream. This frees up as much as 30 percent more net- work bandwidth in large systems. When you have six workstations, they are receiving exactly what is needed to fill the pixels in the tiles. Look, the workstation has a math processor; it can calculate exactly how many pixels each tile takes and ask the camera for that tile for exactly that number of pixels. This will also improve perceived resolution on the monitor. You can’t get better resolution than one pixel from the camera to one pixel on the screen. What can you tell me about proj- ects you’re working on now or have recently completed that you’ve found particularly interesting? Right now, we are upgrading a 10-year-old, large analog video system in a central bank to an enterprise-class digital system, including all branch monitor- ing, situational analysis software, megapixel facial recognition on all entries and exits and artificial intelligence software in critical areas. This is also receiving a basic video pursuit digital video application that allows the console officer to quickly follow subjects of interest throughout the facil- ity from area to area with just a click of the mouse. That’s another industry innovation that every cli- ent wants and manufacturers have no interest in. We are using scripts to do this, but it could just as easily be a built-in function. Your consulting firm is a little different from others. Can you describe how it differs? Right, PPI is an alliance part- nership of subject matter experts (SMEs) in virtually every disci- pline of security. We have over 250 PhD scientists and a lot of highly respected consultants in the partnership. We have specialists in civil disorder control, terrorism counter-surveillance, blast-effects structural engineering. We design protection for the main cables and suspension cables on a long-span suspension bridge, for example. We are a wholesale consulting firm. Our clients are highly regard- ed regional consultants across the U.S., Europe, Middle East, the Gulf and South-Asia. They have the clients. They service the end users and we provide them with expertise. To our knowledge, there is nobody else [who does business] like PPI. —Martha Entwistle The Specifically Speaking col- umn features a Q-and-A with a different security consultant every month. Consultants are provided to Security Systems News by www. SecuritySpecifiers.com