The CTO Corner: Calm amongst Chaos
Bryan Jones, CTO
I spend the majority of my time working with our customers, who are some of the biggest companies in the world, and ensuring that we are maintaining our market lead within the safety, security and compliance space.
I am often asked what I really do. My standard response is “I keep people safe." This can lead to some interesting conversations where people think that I am either a policeman or a spy. A challenge I give to most people and companies is to describe what they do in five words or less. In the investment market - even the best people from the best MBA schools and firms really struggle to do this.
For RightCrowd, right now, it is extremely simple… we create calm amongst chaos.
A few key points I would like to give on the industry and how we are very well positioned with our portfolio and delivery capabilities.
The economy is not “normal” right now
Across the globe we are seeing inflation levels that we have not seen for many decades. Unemployment is low. Skilled labor is very hard to find and unemployment is at record lows.
Why does this matter? Well physical security and safety systems are notoriously hard to “rip and replace." Companies are deferring the decision to do this– but they need to balance this against the need to remain compliant to their own customers and investors.
RightCrowd’s portfolio is uniquely placed to highlight the size of the problem and then progressively solve it. Our Access Analytics solution can be up and running in under a week, where our competitors will take months or years on a full scale IT deployment.
Experience matters
Many companies and executives have not been through this “chaos” before. We have. Our executive team has. RightCrowd has been solving this from the very beginning of our existence.
On a company front, these are things we can solve immediately:
- How are you planning for your workers to return to the office?
- Are you sure they are allowed there?
- Are you really sure?
- How do you make sure your people are safe if they only come into the office a few times a year?
- With so many people changing roles and departments, how do you prove that they can’t do bad things?
- Are you sure? Prove it to me.
Visitors are coming back
After almost three years of a global pandemic, the world is finally starting to return to normal. Your employees will start returning to the office more often but more importantly there will be a surge in visitors and contractors who have never been to your building. How do you know where they are? How do you know they are safe? How will you prove it?
Once your organization starts welcoming the surge of new visitors and contractors on a daily basis, the implementation of RightCrowd Presence Control with its unique and newly released visitor tethering functionality will ensure that these individuals are where they need to be and immediately make this visible to everyone present.
What makes it powerful is that it can be deployed tomorrow without any integration to a visitor management system or existing access control system. You can immediately know whether you have lost someone or someone is in a restricted area - but most importantly we can prove how long a visitor was absent from their host, which is a "must have" for regulated industries. Our solution is very unique and powerful here, with the alternative to prove compliance being to trawl through hours of video footage and event logs.
It's cloud based and deployable immediately. To our customers, handing them a RightCrowd wearable instead of a simple paper or plastic badge will make a clear statement that your organization takes security seriously.
Our wearables automatically activate after successfully signing in, making the visitor's experience easy and seamless. A huge advantage for your organization is the tethering feature, at the start of the visit your hosts can tether their visitors resulting in the system continuously tracking whether the visitors remain close to their hosts.
This is just one new use case that builds on our patented presence control platform. We have recently been partnering with Johnson Controls (JCI), a leader in the security and safety industry, on a highly innovative integration between our wearables and their system that is targeted at high value IP protection.
Imagine if you are creating the next iPhone, the next Nike sneaker or working through an M&A deal - you need to know that everyone in the room is allowed to talk and see it. But how is it done today? Well usually by personal trust, and we all know that people make mistakes and incorrect assumptions.
We can do it visually. We can merge it with people counting data. We provide an evidence trail if something goes wrong.
Read our press release on our Presence Control showcase at the JCI Innovation Lab here.
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