The access control business, much like the technology itself, has historically been one that is slow in adapting to change. As the old saying goes, “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” However, the fact is things are changing and changing quickly for the access control market. No longer can a company just rest on its laurels and expect customers to come to them.
Sielox, one of the stalwarts of the access control industry, has recognized this and decided to change how it approaches the market. In fact, according to Sielox President and CEO Karen Evans, the company has started to transition away from having a direct sales force and opted instead to use manufacturer rep firms, which is already paying dividends for them.
“We’ve got about 80 percent of the country covered right now by manufacturer rep firms and it has proven to be a fabulous decision for the company to move in that direction,” she says. “Rather than five people on the street, we now have 30 sales people working for rep firms on the street and pushing our product out there.”
Of course, having a new go-to-market strategy would not amount to much if a company failed to continue being innovative with their product offerings but that’s not the case with Sielox.
“We have been pushing out a lot of new development into technology,” Evans says. “We sort of see ourselves as a 37-year-old startup the way we look at designing, developing and being a leader in coming up with new ideas. That’s really been our focus, to be the leader in technology and not another, ‘I need to catch up so I can be another me-too offering.’”
With the recent release of version 10 of their flagship Pinnacle access control management system, Evans says Sielox is now current with all of Microsoft’s operating systems and databases. In addition, the new version also provides users with an enhanced user interface.
“Pinnacle has been on the market for us for about 13 years now and so it had a look and feel of something that was built and developed in the early 2000s,” Evans explains. “So, we gave it a nice new fresh look, all-new icons, color scheme and resized all of the screens to adapt to wide monitors.”
The company has been heavily involved in developing lockdown solutions for Pinnacle as well as their crisis management product, CLASS, but while Evans says they’ve always had the capability to lock down doors and block access to readers to just privileged card holders, the number of privileged users an organization could have was capped at a certain number for each reader location. However, that has now been changed.
“We’ve built custom access levels, so now we make entire groups of people privileged to get through the area even if we’ve blocked access to everyone else,” Evans adds. “For example, a school that goes into lockdown might be blocking access to all of the teachers’ cards once they are secured in their classrooms and only a responder’s card or anyone in the responder group would be allowed to access those doors now. We made the feature large enough that it could handle even partitioned databases in multiple sites where we could do up to 16 different, privileged groups at any given time.”
As a company, Evans says Sielox is always researching and evaluating new technologies and strategies to stay ahead of the game.
“We have the ability to adapt pretty quickly and that’s one of the reasons why we were able to introduce the integration [of our 1700 Controller] with [Schlage] NDE locks so quickly within weeks of Allegion saying they were available,” she says. “We were able to have a full working solution because the intelligence of our 1700 panel has a field-programmable processor in it. We make firmware changes and software changes to the processor and can quickly and easily adapt to new technology without having to do a board turn and redesign the board and change the connectors – we just redirect the logic that we’re sending to connectors and can quickly and easily adapt to some of the changing technology that is coming at us.”
