Having served 12 years as the president and chief executive officer (CEO) of HID Global, Denis Hébert is one of the most recognizable thought leaders in the security industry. Between his time at HID and Honeywell prior, Hébert has built a storied career that spans over 30 years in the access control market. After spending a considerable amount of time in the manufacturing side of the business, however, Hébert saw that the industry was beginning to move in a new direction with the advent of cloud and mobile access solutions and wanted to lend his leadership to a company looking to tap this technology evolution.
Last month Feenics Inc., a Canadian-based provider of cloud-hosted access control, announced Hébert was joining the company as president and equity partner. Hébert, who currently serves as the Chairman of the Board of the Security Industry Association (SIA), has known Feenics CEO Sam Shalaby since his early days at HID. What Sam was building at Feenics – the concept of having a subscription-based command and control for physical access in the cloud and providing users with a high-availability, secure and consistently updated solution – was really the future of this security category.
SecurityInfoWatch.com (SIW) caught up with Hébert at this year’s ASIS conference to discuss his goals for the company as well as his thoughts on some of the biggest trends poised to impact the industry in the months and years ahead.
SIW: What was it about Feenics that made you want to be part of the company?
Hébert: I’ve been in this industry for 35 years. I was a product manager, an engineering manager, an integrator, a business president and other positions before I ended up taking over at HID Global, so I’ve seen a lot of the different aspects of what it takes to successfully grow a company. There is a fair amount of complexity in having to deal with the software aspect of the access control system. It isn’t necessarily the software itself but the constant management of it – the upgrades, the patches, the servers, the entire process of continuously keeping it up to date and available. The advent of cloud-based solutions addresses many of these concerns and more, such as providing automatic updates/patches/versioning, ensuring high-availability and improving security management. Feenics is already providing this to its integrator partners via its Keep by Feenics™ security management suite.
SIW: Given your extensive background in the access control industry, are there any particular areas in which you think you will bring an immediate impact to Feenics?
Hébert: My experience on the manufacturing side will hopefully bring to Feenics a supplementary and valuable perspective on what it means to be selling to the integrator community, what it means to be a manufacturer and the associated issues of dealing with the integration of products using various interfaces. We’ve got a good balance between my experience on the manufacturing and product design side, and Sam Shalaby’s experience on the integrator side.
SIW: What do you see as your biggest challenge in taking the helm at the company?
Hébert: It’s a small company and resources are not as unlimited as they would be at a larger one. Therefore, this represents a challenge in adequately reaching the integrator community, evangelizing the benefits of the cloud and moving these value-added resellers to a profitable recurring monthly revenue (RMR) business model, thereby adding more value to their business. They will need to alter their present sales approach, touting the benefits of cloud-based solutions (an accepted premise in the IT domain) for their customers. Feenics is a business that is growing very rapidly and paced for even more growth in the near future.
SIW: Hosted and cloud access control is obviously not a new phenomenon but what do you think it will take to get make more people open to the idea of adopting a hosted access solution for their application?
Hébert: “Hosted” solutions are not that new but the concept of a “true” cloud solution is more novel. Some companies have had hosted solutions for years, but what we are taking about here is real public cloud-based solutions – AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud - a true cloud solution. There is a certain amount of trust that has to be understood regarding security in the cloud and we have to get better at explaining that and other value such as lower total cost of ownership as opposed to having servers on-site. I think that bringing the community to understand the value in security, scalability, high-availability and the benefit to their own business, from RMR and managed services perspective, is key.
SIW: In looking at the overall access control landscape, what trends do you think are going to have the biggest impact on the market moving forward?
Hébert: I believe cloud-based subscription services for hosting physical access control in a true cloud environment, will be the number one change having a substantial impact on our industry. Second, will be the phenomenon of the locking industry introducing wireless, digital locks that are able to communicate directly with an access control system, thereby multiplying the number of doors providing information and data about access. Third, something with which I was directly involved, is mobile access and the concept of identity credentials residing on some other media, primarily mobile devices. These three evolutions will represent a paradigm shift for physical access control in the future.
SIW: What are some of your goals both short- and long-term at Feenics?
Hébert: The primary short-term objective will be to help the community of VARs, integrators, etc. to understand the cloud-based business model and the recurring value it can represent to their business and customers. Selling access control as a service (ACaaS) instead of just moving hardware and software packages adds value and predictable revenue streams to their business, while providing substantial benefit to their customers who can move from large capital outlays for security to a monthly operating expense. If we can get this message out, I know the business will follow. Long term, the goal will be to manage growth.
