Situation Management
Of all the technologies that go into managing a command center, none is gaining market acceptance as fast as the software that coordinates collection and processing of the thousands of events flowing from hundreds of sensors each day. Commonly called situation management software, or command & control center software, these systems are reaching new levels of usefulness in handling alarm and intrusion alerts, notifications from access control systems and environmental sensors, and video surveillance feeds. In 2007 and 2008 the security departments in approximately 10% of all large campus environments (government, military, education, and business) will evaluate their internal systems for situation management and begin the process of upgrading to new software. That creates a tremendous opportunity for new software makers, but poses a threat of confusion and limited adoption unless the buyers have clear understanding of the products.

The DreamerGear™ team from SecurityDreamer.com sought to demystify this new breed of products by conducting a thorough study of six situation management software products in the category of PSIM, physical security event management. We recognize that six vendors is merely a sample set of situation management software makers, however we believe it to be representative of products available on the market today.

Selecting the Field
We selected the participants by polling 400 4Ai.com and SecurityDreamer.com readers, asking them to list the top three vendors in the category about whom they would like more information. Remarkably, solutions from Honeywell, Tyco and UTC Lenel did not make the final cut.

The products evaluated came from Augusta Systems, Intergraph, Orsus, Ortega Infosystems, Proximex and SentryPort.

How We Tested
The DreamerGear team conducted detailed technical interviews and asked each vendor to complete a questionnaire covering over 100 technical questions. We then used further clarifying conversations and our judgment to score each response an a scale from 1-5. Each score was weighted according the importance we felt each individual question held in relation to all other questions. We grouped scores and weights in three major categories:

• Architecture. Evaluating how the hardware, software and networking requirements, product support, major components, overall architecture and design, how it collects, processes and stores data, and from what sources.
• Performance. Evaluating how the product handles changing performance loads. How well it works in geographically distributed environments. What capabilities it has for ensuring performance, processing transactions successfully, and responding to system problems.
• Ease of Use. Evaluating how extensively the product can aggregate, normalize, correlate, present, archive and query data; with what effort the product is installed, configured, and customized.
• Administration. Evaluating how easy, straightforward, intuitive and functional the administration and operation console is, how many useful features for day-to-day operations are included, and how complete are the reporting and response capabilities.
• Value. A judgment based on the quality of useful features in comparison to the installation and configuration effort and price.

Evaluation Criteria
Describe criteria and weightings.
We focused on evaluating features that can be bought and used today. Ready to use. How would someone else weight the findings for personalized results. (Private consultation/consulting available upon request)

We think that video management should be included in this class of products. Therefore a vendor was rewarded for the quality and flexibility of surveillance video management. Vendors without strong video capabilities should partner with complementary solution providers such as Milestone (www.milestone.com), VidSys (www.vidsys.com), and ONSSI (www.onssi.com).