With every passing year, the security industry’s major physical security conferences illustrate how software-driven this formerly hardware-based landscape has become. Software dominates the discussions in most vendor booths, whether it be access control platforms, video surveillance networks, alarms, and intrusion detection systems. Solutions providers like Userful Corporation, a global leader in IT solutions and data visualization, have become regular fixtures at shows like GSX.
This California-based software management company added GSX to its schedule a couple of years ago, searching out enterprise-level clients and senior management security executives who needed business and security operational help with their GSOCs, unified communications strategy, and other crucial mission-critical risk and security services.
Useful is expanding the capabilities of its Quad-Play solution with even more powerful features designed to modernize operations centers. This innovative solution, featured at GSX Booth #2352, combines video walls, advanced operator workstations, war rooms, and operations notifications, all controlled from a central hub. The latest enhancements improve data visualization, simplify control room management, and introduce new tools for communication with frontline workers.
Userful’s core enterprise operations and mission-critical environments serve a wide range of industries worldwide, including healthcare, manufacturing and production, banking and finance, airports and transportation and higher education. Its solutions offer a unified IT platform for enterprise AV applications, providing global manageability through a single-pane-of-glass interface while delivering comprehensive organizational and situational awareness, enabling efficient management of complex operations. Specializing in vertical markets requiring centralized hubs for real-time data, monitoring, coordination, and decision-making, the Userful platform enhances overall performance.
Steve Lasky, SecurityInfoWatch.com editorial director, caught up with Userful President and CEO John Marshall before the GSX show. The discussion revolved around the need for an enterprise solution like Userful offers and how the security implications for these types of organizations would impact business operations.
SIW: Who is Userful, and why should security folks visit your booth at GSX?
Marshall: Userful is a company that developed the Infinity platform. This software-based solution allows your operations center leadership to deploy software either locally on-premises, into a private cloud environment, or the public cloud. We give you infinite flexibility to deploy where your operations center needs are. Ninety percent of the time, we see deployment happening locally to a very isolated Control Center.
But we're increasingly finding more and more interest in distributing those services to multiple sites. Multiple facilities and partners could be affiliated with maintaining the operations, which could be MSPs. So, the interconnectedness of that need is driving more and more people to look at a software-based solution that can reside in multiple places and user pools. This is the leading solution for that distributed type of solution.
SIW: When talking to enterprise level clients and customers, what's your pitch to them and how do you sell them on what the solution can do for them and what the ROI might be down the road?
Marshall: Interestingly, we're seeing the market evolve and take a fork at that decision point; the interest of the enterprise today primarily revolves around security or operations. So, if the interest is around security, that's where we lean heavily on that Quad-Play story, which allows for you to have operator workstations where they're monitoring a very focal set of information, but for all the operators in the room if they need to look up to a video wall to be able to see something that is shared and in common. If there is a crisis or an alert, security personnel need to be able to peel off to a war room to have a deep dive discussion about how to handle the situation and, worst case scenario, if they need to send an all-active alert for something like an active shooter or a break in. Whatever it may be, they need to be able to use digital signage and alerting technology to notify employees' management. Blue light services are available to anyone involved via a cell phone display screen with an alert message mass notification-type messaging. All four of those create the Quad-Play, and that's our value proposition to the security-interested enterprise. Quad-Play is the only solution that offers all this in one platform today.
SIW: Can you provide me with a little more detail on Quad-Play and its capabilities for both operations and security?
Marshall: I'll do it relative to a historical perspective on the security marketplace.
So historically, you had, for example, some companies that could offer a video wall solution. You still have that today, and then some other players will come forward and say, "You know, we have the very best KVM technology for operator workstations, and that's a stand-alone solution." And then you have this whole new marketplace for unified messaging. Unified Communications basically features Zoom and Teams and the like. The challenge is that each one is developing an isolated solution, and they don't necessarily interconnect. How do I move something from the workstation to the video wall and then from the video wall to the war room? Basically, you are dealing with a disconnected solution. Over time, larger players in the space took all those pieces and plugged them together under one logo, under one brand. But they were still pocketed—siloed applications just under a brand but not interconnected.
What we have done at Userful is rebuild from an underlying software-based architecture, interconnecting all those solutions together so they can seamlessly move the content back and forth, and you can continue to scale to more and more sites and have those sites interconnected. Technologically, doing that while maintaining real-time communications and real-time streaming is extremely difficult, and that's what Userful started building back in 2020 and finally delivered as a platform in 2023.
SIW: This is a great tool for monitoring operators because it enhances data visualization and puts all their management tools on one platform. Users must appreciate this.
Marshall: That's a perfect point, which leads me slightly back to that point I was making about the fork in the road earlier. If your interest is primarily security, then you're mostly looking for your sources, your inputs to be surveillance cameras or maybe some IoT triggers telling you if a door opened or closed. Your PISM is in that area, and you want to make it more robust. However, the enterprise increasingly wants to ingest things like Power BI or data metrics that show trends in employee patterns. You want to know how employees move through a building on a given day so you can augment your security profile in those areas versus others. When you start looking at more and more data metrics, a platform needs to be able to develop an “app” that is interconnected to the analysis of those data metric trends. That's one of our platform's newest areas of innovation, allowing security to be about data metrics and surveillance cameras.
Again, we're the only platform offering native integrations with many of those data metrics tools.
SIW: To that point, you've got several technology partners you work with. How does that work?
Marshall: We work very closely with Genetec. In fact, Genetec leads the way in many applications. The same holds true for other players like Milestone and Verkada. We work with all of them, and I would say that they tend to lead the way on that visual surveillance front. But if you're trying to create a multi-sourced environment that's looking at everything from video to imagery and schematics to IoT triggers to data metric ingest, you need a more robust platform that does more than manage and analyze the video. This is where Userful really shines. We are the preeminent platform for ingesting multi-source content.
SIW: For those unfamiliar with the technology and the solutions you're offering, what's the baseline conversation you'll have with them, and what do you want them to leave knowing about your solution?
Marshall: We want to highlight that we understand the operator's workflow in the control room. whether that's a Security Operations Center, Network Operations Center, or Emergency Operations Center, we want them to understand the process.
We know that workflow, so we've designed our booth to be very wide and flow-conscious. During an event discovery, a client will start on the left at an advanced operator workstation, and you can show that up on the video wall. Then, they will migrate that to a war room and trigger it into a mass alert, digital signage, or awareness for a senior manager who needs to get involved. Then we invite them to do a deeper dive into the performance of the platform because people are accustomed to wanting to believe that it's got to be hardware that determines the quality, performance, and response times.
We've been working on the latency and security of this platform since 2020. That's four years of software development, a lifetime in the software world. We want to show people the product's performance and have them push it to the limit. Then, the third issue is that we'll get into the nitty gritty of really talking about whether their need is a security need, an operational need, or a blend of the two. We want to show how dynamically we can pivot as a platform to bring in even more and more opportunities to interconnect their resources as an enterprise.
