First time exhibitor Q&A: Metrasens
With terrorists changing their tactics in recent years and shifting their focus towards soft targets and away from more well-guarded locations like government buildings and airports, there has been a clamor for solutions that can provide advanced detection of firearms, explosive devices and other threats.
As demonstrated by the 2015 Paris attacks and last year’s Manchester Arena bombing in the UK, terrorists today are just as content with massacring people as they enter or leave a venue as they are successfully infiltrating one. This has subsequently expanded the security perimeters for those in charge of security at stadiums and other soft targets.
The challenge facing these venues – unlike hard targets that can make people undergo a rigorous screening process prior to entry – is that they must remain as open as possible or run the risk of turning visitors away by implementing overly burdensome security measures. And while there has been a noticeable increase in products designed to reduce the friction of the screening process, many still are not suitable for these types of applications.
One company that is looking to change this is Metrasens, which manufactures ferromagnetic detection systems for a wide range of vertical markets. The company was founded in 2005 by a pair of physicists in the UK who pioneered the technology.
Though their solution was initially focused on providing increased MRI safety for hospital staff and patients due to threats posed by undetected metal objects, the company later branched into security, focusing on several verticals including corrections, mental health, physical data security and counterterrorism.
SecurityInfoWatch (SIW) caught up with Jim Viscardi, Vice President of Global Security for Metrasens, which is making its first appearance at ASIS/GSX this year, to discuss how their technology works and what differentiates it from other screening solutions on the market.
SIW: How does ferromagnetic detection technology work?
Viscardi: Ferromagnetic detection works very simply. Rather than creating a field that you walk through like a walk-through metal detector, it considers the Earth’s magnetic field, which is invisible, penetrates everything and is all around us, and it notices anything that moves through that field that has a magnetic signal. When you move something like a cell phone through the Earth’s magnetic field it creates a wake behind it much like a duck swimming across a still pond. The bigger that duck is or the faster it is moving, the bigger the wake. All our system does is detect the wake. It does so passively, so that it is intrinsically safe. It doesn’t emit anything, so it’s healthy for pregnant women, people with pacemakers, etc. And it is effective.
Because magnetic fields penetrate things, in the corrections market, for example, we can detect things inside the inmates’ bodies, which is where a lot of contraband tends to be stored or inside their belongings, mattresses or behind walls, etc. The same thing with data security, if someone wants to smuggle a very small thumb drive or portable hard drive under their arm, in their clothes or even inside them, our system can detect those things. With counterterrorism, it has more to do with the speed with which we can detect. In that instance, because the system is a single pole design and because it is constantly monitoring, we can walk people by the unit at their normal pace. We don’t have to slow people down, we don’t have to have them divest and we can ignore all of the stuff they have on them that might cause a signal but they’re allowed to bring into a stadium – cell phone, keys and so forth – and move people though there at a pace that is eight to 10 times that of traditional metal detectors.
SIW: What would you say are some of the biggest adoption hurdles for end users that are looking at leveraging technology like yours?
Viscardi: The single biggest one is coming to terms with the differences between our technology and traditional technologies and not just how they work but how we use them. We don’t build a walk-through metal detector replacement, so if a customer wants to use a walk-through metal detector at the front door to screen people, we encourage that. We believe in a layered security approach and think it is truly important in providing a comprehensive security solution. However, it is very easy to take that square, walk-through metal detector peg and try and squeeze it into a round security application hole that exists in other parts of their organization.
Our system is not hard to use, it has three buttons – on, off and volume – so it couldn’t get much simpler but the paradigm is different in terms of the technology and where you can put it, which is to say anywhere you want. People are used to being limited in where they could put this, so their imagination is limited by what they think a walk-through metal detector can do. We’re trying to get customers to think beyond that and where else I can put this? What else could I use to help me achieve my security mission?
SIW: What do you believe have been some of the biggest shortcomings of products for this market historically?
Viscardi: This is a market, the security screening market as a whole, that hasn’t seen a lot of changes to existing products for a long time. Whether it is walk-through metal detectors, which for the most part, look and act like they did 20 years ago to X-ray equipment that looks, acts and sounds like it did 20 years ago. There have been other screening tools for other types of materials like explosives, drugs and things of that nature, but the biggest challenge the security industry has to come to terms with is how to work around tools, which while they may have limitations, are the only ones available so they just kind of learn to make do.
A walk-through metal detector detects all metals. In my mind, that is a limitation not an advantage because as a screening operator, I don’t need to detect all metals. I only need to detect the metals that are used to make weapons and other threat objects. If a system can learn to be more selective and more specific about detecting threat objects vs. all objects, then that’s better for the screening officer that has to resolve those inevitably fewer but more likely alarms.
SIW: What is your go-to-market strategy?
Viscardi: For the physical data security and counterterrorism market, which are the two markets we’re addressing at GSX, we sell through both channel partners and direct. It depends on the customer and the location, but we sell a fair amount to the federal government and we work with integrators as well as distributors. We sell to tech companies in Silicon Valley and we handle those (customers) both directly and through integrators. The most important thing for us is can we ensure that the customer understands exactly what it is we’re providing in terms of the value proposition.
One of things we wanted to do is have people in our company who truly understand their respective markets and have lived in them. For example, our trainers in corrections are ex-corrections folks who combined between the two of them have over 40 years of experience in the corrections market.
SIW: What’s your footprint in North American and with the U.S. specifically?
Viscardi: We have a U.S. headquarters in Chicago. Those operations are primarily our customer-facing parts of the organization and we have close to 40 employees working out of the U.S. office that are primarily field sales and service personnel. We also cover all 50 states.
SIW: Why did you decide to exhibit at GSX this year?
Viscardi: This is really the first time we’ve had a product for both the physical data security and counterterrorism markets. What we’re really looking forward to is exposing the product to a lot of customers that might not otherwise see it. In the physical data security market, for example, our solution really is for the protection of classified, company-sensitive information but that spans across a number of different markets – financial, data centers, corporate, government, etc.
We build products that fit within the operational, sometime even physical structure that our customers have. We don’t’ ask them to build what they do around what we do.
About the Author:
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
