At last night's Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards Banquet, Hirsch Electronics Corporation took away the 2005 Global Excellence Award for Technology of the Year. Hirsch is a leading solution provider and also the pioneer of the ScramblePad® technology.
The company is both a manufacturer of access control systems and a developer of security management systems, and received the award for its continuing innovations and leadership in the high security access control & security management systems market and its commitment toward interoperable solutions.
Every year, Frost & Sullivan presents this award to the company that has demonstrated global excellence in a given business function such as sales, marketing, customer service, technology innovation, product quality, supply chain management, and growth strategy. It recognises proactive global integration strategies that position the recipient to emerge as a global leader.
Hirsch is a market leader in keypad-based access control systems, and has over time, expanded its hardware product line to support emerging technologies such as biometrics and smart cards in its readers. It is also the developer of path-breaking security management solutions that enable integration of multiple systems - door access, alarm monitoring, video surveillance, badging, and database management.
"Unlike most of its competitors, Hirsch has constantly evolved itself to cater to changing demands," says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Karthik Nagarajan. "The company launched the 'scrambling' technology in keypads as early as 1981. The ScramblePad later became an immensely successful product among government agencies for its security features."
To add value to the ScramblePad technology, Hirsch worked with leading manufacturers in the proximity technology market to design a dual technology reader. As a result, ScrambleProx™ came into existence and another new Hirsch patent that covered any scrambling keypad and contactless radio frequency identification (RFID) reader was recorded.
Further exploring possibilities of enhancing its keypad technology, Hirsch partnered with BQT Solutions from Australia, to design the integration of a MIFARE® reader into the ScramblePad. The result was the launch of ScrambleSmart™, yet another successful patented Hirsch technology.
The Hirsch Technical Support team is a prime example of the company's commitment toward customer value enhancement. Readily reachable by customers worldwide for free, it has the ability and the resources required to replicate the customer's configuration swiftly and suggest a hands-on solution. Hirsch is also committed to enhancing user awareness of its technologies, through the Hirsch Learning Center, which provides programs that provide hands-on training to students in installing, commissioning, and administering its products.
Hirsch is proactive in ensuring cost-efficiency for its customers. Its security management software, 'Velocity', is designed on a bottom-up model and for forward compatibility, so that customers will find scaling and upgrading economical. The Velocity application programming interface (API) - a dynamic linked library (DLL) - when combined with a native extensible mark-up language (XML) interface and web server ensures that the security management software is compatible with third-party software.
"With the growing need for integration in enterprise applications, it is mandatory that the security management system of a company be integrated with its HR and visitor management systems and Velocity's APIs make this simple," notes Nagarajan. "The third-party HR or visitor management system providers only need to use these APIs to integrate their applications with it."
This will eventually lead to a scenario where an employee who is removed from the payroll or a visitor who becomes suspicious, will automatically lose access to the premises/systems, without any need for individual updates.
In spite of its extensive R&D initiatives, Hirsch's products remain completely standards based. In addition to meeting the various de facto standards, its products are designed to be compatible with Underwriters Laboratories Listings and Approvals for UL 294 Access Control Systems and UL 1076 Proprietary Burglar Alarm Systems.
Hirsch's initiatives in enhancing cross industry standards have made interoperable solutions a reality in the world security markets. This will enable solution developers to leverage existing IT infrastructure and build systems that can reduce cost and generate management tools that were hitherto impossible. For these achievements, the company is a worthy recipient of the Global Excellence Award for Technology of the Year.
