First-time exhibitor Q&A: SilverShield

In the wake of multiple mass shootings and other violence incidents that have occurred at schools across the country in recent years, there has been a clamor for technologies that address the existing security gaps in many K-12 facilities.

First and foremost among these are access control and visitor management, which present a number of challenges for schools, including the onboarding and removal of students and faculty which can be daunting given the constant turnover. There’s also the issue of preventing people who pose a known threat – sex offenders, persons that have made violent threats against students and teachers, etc. – from being able to enter the building.

In fact, the search for an optimal visitor management system proved so difficult for American Learning Systems, which owns and operates the privately run American Heritage Schools, that they decided to create their own cloud-based solution dubbed SilverShield, which is making its debut appearance at ISC West this year. Although it was originally developed with school campuses in mind, SilverShield is applicable to a wide range of vertical markets, such as healthcare and corporate offices, and offers lockdown initiation, incident management, and other features in addition to visitor management.

SecurityInfoWatch (SIW) caught up with SilverShield CTO Robin Baker to discuss what sets the SilverShield system apart in the market and where other solutions are lacking when it comes to features for today’s K-12 schools.  

SIW: It’s not every day that a firm that runs private schools gets involved in developing security software, so what was it that motivated American Learning Systems to develop SilverShield?

Baker: They own very large private schools where the tuition is quite high and so they feel an obligation to their staff, students, parents, and all stakeholders to do a great job at security and all of the products on the market that they tried, they didn’t feel were good enough. They felt they were missing major features, such as watch lists to help look for (people who pose) pre-determined threats and not allowing them on campus or into facilities. Also, (these solutions) weren’t multi-platform so they couldn’t use any type of device and so people were limited to access to emergency information just because of hardware. They looked at a lot of different products and they were constantly disappointed, so they thought, ‘Well, if it doesn’t exist and we need it, we’ll just have to make it ourselves’ and that’s how they got into the game.

SIW: What are some of the common problems you’ve found with other visitor management systems?

Baker: We built this to overcome those aforementioned gaps. So, some of our differentiation is that we don’t suffer from some of the same problems of existing technology. Having a technology infrastructure that allows our clients to talk to each other but also integrate with camera systems, door locking systems, access control and the rest is a big one. The technology that supports it is a huge differentiator and that’s because some of the market leaders don’t have this. Many of the market leaders have kiosk systems and PC-based systems or they will use one platform like an iPad. The problem with that is the client then has to invest in quite a bit of hardware and because we are hardware agnostic, that goes away. We had to go completely hardware agnostic to overcome those things that drove our owners to build this.

The other thing is the type of notification that is used for mass notification is typically only done using emails and texts. Emails are the least efficient because not everyone is looking at their email all day long and texts are great if you’re cellular data is working but sometimes in buildings you have very thick walls and you may or may not get a signal depending on your carrier.  We added push notifications and not just mobile – though it is fast and powerful – but a lot of people are not tech savvy and don’t understand what push notifications are so we also added web push because a lot of people will be sitting in front of their computers and not paying attention to their mobile devices.

Multi-location integration is also a big issue in the industry because let’s say there is a school district with a hundred schools, well many competitive offerings don’t allow clients to share data amongst themselves across locations. If school number one puts Robin Baker on a watch list, school number two hundred doesn’t know that. When we created our multi-location nomenclature we ensured, because it’s cloud based, that these features are shared amongst many locations as necessary.

SIW: What’s your go-to-market strategy? Do you plan to sell exclusive through the channel moving forward?

Baker:  We do have our own channel but we are looking for resellers and distributors, so we’re definitely looking to work with integrators to help us distribute the product. We had a company call us the other day that does large camera and door locking installations and they had a big, big healthcare client that needed visitor management and incident management, so they were able to provide us with information that their client is looking for someone with a product like ours, by leveraging those integrators, access control (installers) and other types of related companies. Our go-to-market strategy is to have our own channel to handle sales but we’re looking for distribution and are very focused on that.

SIW: What vertical markets are you targeting besides schools?

Baker: Healthcare is a big one that we’re focusing on. There are also construction sites and construction-related industries that we are very helpful in. We do offer a criminal background check – most of our clients are actually limited in how they can use that – they can use to check potential employees as a cursory overview to ensure that if someone walks off the street and onto a construction site looking for a job, they can opt-in for a criminal background check and either include or exclude them quite efficiently.  

SIW: How many active deployments of SilverShield do you have currently?

Baker: We only have a few school districts and about 20 private schools right now. We are also in some pretty strong negotiations with some healthcare facilities and some other school districts that we’re looking to close as well.

About the Author: 

Joel Griffin is the Editor of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].