Matthew Jefferson is the Sales Director at ACS Technologies, Tyne & Wear. The company installs fire, security, TV, sound and audio visual technology and is accredited NSI Gold, CAI, CHAS, and BAFE (pending).
Is third party accreditation beneficial to your company?
Yes, especially for commercial jobs where a consultant is involved in writing a performance specification or where an insurance company has specified a graded alarm system.
Are there any common requests from customers that give you problems?
We are often asked to integrate CCTV systems onto smart phones which can give us a few problems. For example, certain domestic routers have restrictions on the use of ports and the CCTV server that all the images are routed through can sometimes fail.
Do you think there is a skills shortage in the industry? Any trouble recruiting?
There is no shortage of people able to first fix and second fix, we have however, struggled to find really good commissioning / service engineers who are able to fault find.
What will be the impact of home automation on the security sector?
Home automation will allow people to set/unset their intruder alarm remotely and view CCTV images as required, it will also alert them of any alarm activations. Whilst this may sound really useful, I don’t fully see the benefits apart from occasionally being able to unset the alarm to maybe let a family member in your home etc. Because of this, although people will expect security integration with home automation, I don’t think they will use it much.
What is the security industry’s biggest myth?
I’m not sure this is such a myth anymore, but generally people are completely immune to alarms sounding and don’t investigate them.
Read the full interview in the July 2016 edition of PSI magazine
