It’s been a whirlwind of activity at ISC West in Vegas, so I’m glad I took the time to post daily impressions from the show.
- Day 1 ISC West Impressions: booth traffic, new point-to-point product, IMS Research briefing, ISC East
- Day 2 ISC West Impressions: ‘piece of cake,’ cost savings with wireless & ‘does mesh have a problem with video?’
- Day 3 ISC West Impressions and Recap: security network design, missed tweetup, & how shows save you money
- Are Security Trade Shows Still Relevant? – ‘Coming-up-to-ISC-West’ guest post
My main takeaway: ISC West will continue as a major, if not the main, trade show for the North American physical security market. Not so sure about ISC Solutions or ASIS though.
ASIS, as primarily an end-user show, was hardest hit when the economy went down, taking the end-user travel budgets with it. Furthermore, ASIS’s conference programming looks much stronger than that of ISC West. This is good for conference attendees, but bad for exhibitors, as people have more reason to stay out of the exhibit hall.
Still, ASIS could do more to draw traffic to the exhibits; when I compare ASIS with BICSI (also featuring a strong conference component), BICSI does a much better job of getting conference attendees into the exhibits, by scheduling a welcome reception, conference lunches, and other activities there. The drop in booth traffic at ASIS 2009 in Anaheim made us reduce our 20X20 booth size that we’d had for 3 years and go with 10X20 island space.
We’ll see how ASIS 2010 will turn out in Dallas; it’s a good spot for us, since there’s a long-standing wireless video surveillance system there for Dallas PD (now at 125+ cameras, 100% on wireless), so it will be nice to reference it.
See Dallas PD case study on Firetide’s web site; solution partners were: Sony Electronics (video cameras), BridgeWave Wireless (point-to-point wireless backhaul), OnSSI (video management); the system designed and implemented by Bearcom, a Dallas-based wireless solution provider.
What are your thoughts on ISC West vs ASIS?
It’s good to be home after three busy days in Vegas. Lots of follow-up to do in the coming week. Our booth traffic was 15% better than a year before: back to 2008 numbers, after a dip in 2009. Visitors were solid, and feedback on our new point-to-point product was excellent. I heard reports of people placing orders on the spot; we will be shipping the point-to-point bridges in April. Even for what we consider a ‘low-end’ product, we are delivering 35 Mbps UDP/25 Mbps TCP; plus, our MIMO-based point-to-point product is coming out later this year – with much higher throughput.




