Walking the show floor at ISC West in April literally gave me a sense of déjà vu — as in, didn’t we just do this a month or two ago? The booths, the crowds, the technology, there is a rhythm to these events that starts to feel a bit routine at times. I know I wasn’t alone. Several people commented on having that same feeling. But when I was able to sit down with both manufactures and integrators and have more in-depth conversations, some key trends — both technology and geopolitical — took shape as dominating the event.
Here is a look at a few of the top ones.
Tariff Talk
The timing of the show, April 2-4, coincided with the roll-out of major tariffs from the Trump administration, an undercurrent that ran throughout the show.
Security-Net members Barry Komisar, president and CEO of Vision Security Technologies, ranked No. 33 on the 2024 SDM Top Systems Integrators Report, and David Alessendrini, vice president – ISS sales manager for Pasek Security, both had thoughts to share on this.
“Dave and I are here with Security-Net to have our partner meeting Monday and then we had our Tech-Net and sales meeting,” Komisar said. “Do you want to know what the biggest topic today is …. AI? No. Business Intelligence? No. It’s tariffs. That is the discussion of the day.
“You know, we went through COVID and we learned that we got the short end of the stick. The manufacturers increased their prices. We couldn’t increase our prices where we had set contracts, and we ate it. Now we have another COVID-like watershed moment. … so we had our vendor partners come in and they spoke to us over the last two days and we called them to the carpet. We don’t want to get the short end of the stick this time, so we need transparency. We need open communication.”
Alessandrini said, “We are directly affected by steel tariffs. We sell metal doors and door operators, so any of those products we’re going to see them go up. The door hardware, all the locks, they’re all made from steel. There are all the parts inside it, the springs. … We just don’t know where it’s going to go.”
Based on their meetings with vendors, both predicted potential average price increases in the range of 3-4 percent across the board.
“Everybody’s talking about tariffs,” Tim Palmquist, vice president, Americas, Milestone, acknowledged. “Tariffs are a very real thing, and if you just look at the stock market today you can see that’s true. We’ll see how this shakes out. I would like to think it is a lot of bluster and will go away soon. But there’s a part of me that thinks this could hang on for a while.”
While companies like Milestone and Genetec both noted they are less affected as primarily software companies, the impact is still of concern. “I think we are already seeing it affect people’s confidence,” Palmquist said. “Therefore they may not spend in the same way they used to or at the same velocity. We have seen some purchase orders get delayed. … ‘We’ll see how that plays out through the first half, but it could affect business results this year.”
“Wait and see” seemed to be the main approach of every manufacturer we asked — although some, like Axis and i-PRO — noted that they have either diversified supply chains or other options, and were hoping not to have to increase prices by much if at all.
Alain Bissada, area vice president for North America at Genetec also stressed the company’s flexibility of using different partners depending on the situation with tariffs, along with the idea that the supply chain crisis of a few years ago taught everyone in the industry to have a more flexible and resilient mindset that might serve them well in this tariff situation.
AI Getting More Accessible
Technology-wise, it was no surprise that AI solutions dominated the show. From integrations to edge to software, AI was everywhere, as was the case last year. But what was new this year, was an increased effort to make AI easier and more accessible both for the integrator and the end user customer.
AMAG Technology featured a VMS integration with AI-based video analytics and an emphasis on real-time alerting. Eagle Eye also talked about AI.
“Customers really don’t care about the specifics of AI,” said Hans Kahler, chief operating officer of Eagle Eye Networks. “They are focusing on a single place to get information and business intelligence.”
Scott Switzer, president and CEO of IDIS Americas noted the interest around AI at the show. “At this point, you know we have the capability of finding someone wearing a certain color shirt, or glasses or a hat. So that’s real and that’s meaningful, in addition to that being able to do that on the edge. If we really need to do a deep dive into AI and do things like gun detection or aggression detection, we have those capabilities now. I think that is that progression of the product over the last year and a half, and to me, it’s visible. It is significant.
“When people come in and talk to us in the booth, they’re excited about those things. There always seem to be these jumps in technology, right? And there are certain in-between periods where the customers want to come and see you and further the relationship but they’re not as excited technology-wise. [Now] we seem to be at one of those moments where that interest is piqued, which always makes it fun from the manufacturer perspective.”
i-PRO’s chief product ambassador, Huey Sekiguchi, reported that attendees were excited about the company’s edge cameras that can turn non-AI cameras into AI cameras.
Palmquist said that a lot of Milestone’s booth traffic was due to the company’s AI training module, Project Hafnia, which leverages the NVIDIA platform. Hafnia means “harbor” in Danish, I was informed.
“What we’re talking about with Project Hafnia is Milestone is working to build what’s called a ‘data lake’ for the purposes of training AI,” Palmquist explained. “One of the interesting things in our industry … we collect tons of valuable data, but we really only go look at it in case somebody had a slip and fall or we’re missing something or something bad happened. And then by design, the software throws that data away every 30 days or 90 days and what people are waking up to is the fact that, ‘Wait a minute. We’re throwing away the best quality data out there that we could train these AI models on.”
Immix released an AI framework to make it easier for their customers to use any AI camera or systems they choose.
“We will never build the AI that does the work,” said Chris Brown, CEO of Immix. “We want to give everybody a choice. I don’t care what AI you want to use; go downstairs [to the show floor], and pick one you like. I don’t care; I just want you to be able to turn it on through the platform. … Use any AI and turn it on and off by the click of a mouse.”
Komisar was excited about AI advancements he was seeing. “We do a lot of enterprise solutions … where there are hundreds or thousands of cameras. Initially it was forensically right after the fact: Where has this person been? How do I track them using artificial intelligence for that? But now they’ve gotten to the point where we’re tracking them as they’re moving now in real-time. I’ve always wanted to get there, and this is my 33rd year in the industry, I’ve seen the whole industry change. Now we’re finally getting to the point where we can do auto tracking and find somebody and it’ll go from camera to camera to camera. And that, to me, is a game changer.”
Data — the New Frontier?
Behind AI, and many of the other technologies on display this year, is the real reason for all of these capabilities: what to do with all that useful data and how to capture it in a way the user needs.
Milestone’s Palmquist boldly stated, “Data is the new frontier in the security industry. It is this untapped asset that before was an afterthought and all of a sudden it has come to the forefront.” In addition to the AI training rollout, Milestone was also featuring a digital evidence management system designed to let customers keep control of their own data, Palmquist said. “We’re saying, ‘It’s your data; you have the freedom to use it as you would like.’ The themes we’re featuring here with digital evidence management and Project Hafnia on data insights, both sort of go together. It’s about data and freedom.” Palmquist added that data could be as influential as the analog to IP shift in the 1990s. “We thought cloud was going to be the big change, but honestly, I think it’s the data that is going to seismically shift our industry. We’ll see. I could be wrong.”
Many referenced the concept of proactive — as opposed to reactive — security.
“The point of being here and showing these capabilities is to show the customer how they can benefit from it, and how they can use the new advanced technology within their own businesses to either help secure, prevent, be proactive,” said Kristin Plitt, vice president of marketing and sales development for IDIS Americas. “We’re taking in all of this data, and have these new features and abilities to [help them] make smarter business decisions. … There are reasons for implementing these new advanced technologies and we want to teach the customer about what it can help them with, so it’s not just always helping to save someone or … find a perpetrator. Now it’s taking it a step further, where we’re trying to prevent that from even happening by knowing what characteristics we’re looking for to identify them faster and to help people be more proactive.”
Komisar was also enthusiastic about proactive security and data mining. “Like I said, we’re doing large-scale enterprise solutions with hundreds or thousands of card readers with tens of thousands or just thousands of cards and users. There is a lot of data out there, and they are data mining to understand trends, like where are the anomalies? This person normally goes here and here and all of a sudden, why is this person going at 3:00 in the morning down this hallway? When you’ve got 10,000 card holders and 5000 doors, that’s a lot of data. We’re all about force multipliers: How can we use video and access to try to prevent something through an action that we’ve set the parameters up for proactively rather than being reactive. I’m seeing a lot of that too, and I think that’s the future.”
Other Cool Things
Another technology I noticed was a return to focusing on apps. From NAPCO’s MVP Easy cloud-based platform for SMB applications, which uses an app instead of a database, to Milestone’s new App-Center that allows integrators and users to try out new technologies via an app, there were seemingly more app-based solutions, I was suddenly hearing more about apps than in recent years.
One of the more interesting app-mentions was the one in Everon’s Interim CEO Tim Whall’s head.
“On the consumer side of the business there are apps where you can figure out what’s going on at your property,” Whall said. “If I want to know what’s going on with a lock, I can; if I want to arm and disarm it or there’s alarm going off, I can respond to it. If there’s video I want to look at, I can. On the commercial [enterprise] side, we have all these different vendors that don’t really play well together. Most of our buyers have multiple product lines. … So in the commercial space, you really haven’t seen anybody come up with an app that says, let’s say, this is an Everon system. … So we have spent a fair number of mind-meets here with our manufacturers to say, ‘Here is what I need from you so I can deliver an Everon app that includes a Bosch panel, with Hanwha cameras, with Gamewell fire systems, etc. so I can get my test inspect report. I can see what I have on my video cameras, I can arm and disarm it and do the basic things that we can do on our consumer systems.’”
When asked when that would be available, Whall added, “As of now it has been shared with many people that’s what’s in my head. That’s what I pretty much do. This is what I’d like to see and I don’t mind if everyone is chasing what we’re doing. I’m not buying it; I am creating it. It is an Everon tool. I think I’ve shared with several people that before next show we will have that up and running.”
Another new development announced at the show was the partnership between Immix and RAD to develop a strategic integration between Immix’s incident management software and RAD’s speaking autonomous responsive agent, SARA.
“We frankly think that an autonomous operator is a thing of the future, if not the present,” Brown said. “I do believe that what the SARA product does is wildly interesting in terms of the ability to dispatch four or five conversations at once, spread information across those conversations, even connect them and react accurately.
“One of the things they did that I found interesting and why I called Steve (Reinharz, RAD’s CEO/CTO) and said let’s meet on Monday, is they deployed law enforcement three times successfully. The autonomous agent took the 911 alarm call, called law enforcement and did a full dispatch end-to-end without a human involved. And many of the people in the industry have long said law enforcement will never accept information from a robot. Now that has happened and it has cracked the door open. We think it’s going to happen rather quickly, shockingly enough.”
Overall, in spite of the tariff undercurrents, the general consensus of manufacturers and integrators alike was that ISC West 2025 was a very successful show.
“What a wonderful way to meet a bunch of people in a logistically favorable opportunity,” Whall said. “It’s rare we get to see customer after customer in one spot. It has been fantastic. … The show itself, for me, it feels like a lot of people. I remember coming out here in the past, and it could be my memory, but it feels busier. I’m impressed and excited to see how crowded it is.”
Security 101’s director of marketing, Corey Tyriver, agreed, adding “ISC West is the ‘everything show’ now.” — Karyn Hodgson, SDM Editor-in-Chief
An Industry Comes Together
For a week in April, Vegas has to accommodate a sizable portion of the security industry alongside its Sphere, slot machines and Elvis impersonators. According to SIA, that portion of the industry amounted to 29,000 security professionals zig-zagging the 6,000 plus sq. ft. show floor to meet with manufacturers and see some of the latest tech first-hand — that is if they weren’t attending keynotes, awards presentations and educational sessions.
Most commented that this was one of the most well-attended ISC Wests in memory. Many — like Daniel Rosales, senior director of marketing, Product Management, and Technical Services, Telguard, opted for a more intimate booth shifting the focus to connection and conversation. “Come talk to us, let’s have a conversation,” he said as far as the message Telguard wanted to tell this year.
Christopher Denniston, director of marketing & contract development, Rapid Response Monitoring, also emphasized the importance of connecting with partners at this year’s event. “We’ve had a great time with a lot of dealers — great traffic, good conversation and great conversations about the future, where monitoring is going and how AI is taking part in it.”
AI as Far as the Eye Can See
The talk of the town was surely AI, as Editor-in-Chief Karyn Hodgson also observed. But there was an increased attention on the simplicity of the security story this year: at the end of the day, security is about keeping people safe. “We’re trying to keep people safe,” Spencer Dunford, director of sales, AtlasIED said, “We’re keeping kids, staff, and organizations safe, meanwhile adding daily value. We’re reducing risk for trespassing, sudden crowd formation, and slip-and-fall injuries. We’re also excited about teaming up with other vendors in our space to amplify the security story with access control support, mass notification support and even third-party monitoring support with organizations like RapidSOS.”
And what can these modern, AI-enhanced systems offer? At March Networks’ booth, I was shown an AI video search that went further than commands like “man in red shirt” or “beige van.” Jeff Corrall, chief product officer, March Networks, demonstrated the system’s ability to present results like “unattended cash on the counter” or “boxes blocking doors.”
Tom Mechler, product marketing manager, Bosch Security, said, “Of course we think of a burglar alarm system as security: when the building is closed and a burglar breaks in, we detect it and we send an alert. But what’s more important than that is the things we do when the system is not armed. We can detect things like a door being propped or a vehicle being where it shouldn’t be — things that happen during the day when the building’s occupied. We like to talk about security beyond security, all of the other things that our systems can do like monitoring, reporting, and controlling different parts of your building to make it more secure, more safe, and more efficient.”
Continued Convergence
Some of the capabilities beyond security are unlocked by the convergence of technologies or the continued integration toward the end goal of the single pane of glass. It’s a trend that Pete Bower, vice president of global sales engineering, Brivo, commented on from the sales floor. “One trend we’re excited to talk about is the convergence of different parts and pieces in the physical security space unified in one platform,” Bower said. “It’s super important to have that visitor management, access control, and video there and available for administrators to make it easy for them to manage all the parts and pieces of their facilities every day.”
Jake Leichtling, director of product, Verkada, said this approach has been moving very well for Verkada. “We’re continuing on our journey to make powerful, centralized physical security management for enterprise scale,” Leichtling said. “That breaks down into a few things. Leaning more into our hybrid cloud architecture, which is making it simple to scale and easy to operate in a centralized fashion. We’re continuing to expand into more and more products has unlocked the greater power of a centralized platform. What we see is that every single time we add a new product into our single pane of glass, is that we unlock exponential value with integration between the product area. Managing at enterprise scale can propose a lot of challenges, so we’re constantly listening to our customers and our partners to build software — which of course gets automatically upgraded — to make management at scale as easy as possible.”
Personally, it’s the convergence of seemingly the entire security industry that attracts me to ISC West most. Some connections span the globe — meaning that they are maintained through phone calls and emails. But for one week in April we all get to look each other in the eye and maybe lose $60 on roulette with one another. It’s that coming together that many find to be the most valuable aspect of the show.
“The importance of this show is that it’s an industry coming together — an industry working to solve problems,” Nate Spitz, general manager, locks and access solutions, Allegion, said. “We want to make the world a safer place. To do that involves our software partnership and all of our continued partnership here at Allegion.” — Christopher Crumley, SDM Associate Editor
https://www.sdmmag.com/articles/104200-what-was-the-buzz-at-isc-west-2025