PHOENIX — Security and AV integrators are stepping up to help school officials, business leaders and more as those officials are faced with stemming the tide of increased violence and terrorism in a variety of ways and in cities and towns across the U.S. and around the world.
What that means is mass notification is becoming a crucial part of an integrator’s toolbox, says Michael Peveler, vice president of sales at AtlasIED.
“It is growing quite a bit,” Peveler tells Dan Ferrisi, group editor, commercial and security at Emerald. “We’ve seen substantial growth, like multiple 100 times over growth in the six and a half years that I’ve been here with AtlasIED.
“The very unfortunate reality is that this market is growing because we have some serious issues in the in the country regarding violence, weapons, various other things,” he says. “This is not a pro- or anti-Second Amendment discussion. The reality is we’ve got enough events that owners of companies, superintendents and leaders of schools and healthcare facilities are reaching out at a really growing rate, asking for help because they want to protect their employees. They want to protect their students, whatever the vertical and the application is.”
Peveler sees mass notification as increasing in importance as more people, who created what he calls “their own space” during the COVID-19 pandemic return to the office but still prefer creature comforts such as headphones to give themselves some small measure of privacy. That’s where AtlasIED can help, he says.
“We have to be intrusively loud at that point,” says Peveler. “We’ve got to be a volume overriding what’s coming into their space, whether it’s conferencing, meeting, collaboration space or in factories, where people are wearing protective earphones and that kind of thing.”
While conventional wisdom is that mass notification is intended for schools, there are a lot more vertical markets embracing its use these days, says Peveler.
“I think the market more and more is for everyone,” he says. “I’ve said this for a while. The interesting thing is, we walk into buildings a lot of times, and we find that there is no mass communication system, mass notification system. When you talk to the AV vendor that did the job, they say, ‘well, it said mass notification so we thought that was security.’ And then we go talk to the security vendor, and they go, ‘Well, it was a paging station and speakers and amplifiers. We thought it was AV.'”
“What ends up happening a lot of times, candidly, is the network company that’s selling the switches and servers comes in and swoops the business. What I tell every integrator I meet with is the first thing you should do is learn and see if it’s a fit. Again, this is a sad reality of where we are but the idea that today this is K-12, this is low margin, these are 1980s bell and PA systems is not true anymore,” says Peveler.
Check out their full conversation:
