This month we welcome the latest release, Perspective Version 3.3. While this could be considered more of a minor release for us, a lot of effort went in to improving the overall performance and usability of the product—from the load time of e-Reporting, to adding tab orders to all data entry forms, to customizable hot keys to improve navigation.

We were also able to roll out two frequently requested features into one significant change to attachments. The new ‘add attachment’ form allows you to add multiple files to a record at one time using convenient drag and drop functionality. For example, if you have several pictures to add to an incident from a camera, you will now be able to do this in one quick step which will help speed up your entry time significantly.

As always, our Development team was also hard at work resolving bugs to improve the overall stability of Perspective.  If you are using Perspective SaaS, your upgrade is complete. For everyone else, the update is ready for download today.

—Ryan Thiessen, Director, Product Management

What is “big data?”

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data—so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. This data comes from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals to name a few. This data is big data, and it is more than simply a matter of size; it is an opportunity to find insights into new and emerging types of data and content, to make your business more agile and to answer questions that were previously considered beyond your reach.¹

According to IDC, it is imperative that organizations and IT leaders focus on the ever-increasing volume, variety and velocity of information that forms big data.²

Volume. Many factors contribute to the increase in data volume—transaction-based data stored through the years, text data constantly streaming in from social media, increasing amounts of sensor data being collected, etc. In the past, excessive data volume created a storage issue. But with today’s decreasing storage costs, other issues emerge, including how to determine relevance amidst the large volumes of data and how to create value from relevant data.

Variety. Data today comes in many types, from traditional databases to hierarchical data stores created by end users and OLAP systems, to text documents, email, meter-collected data, video, audio, stock ticker data and financial transactions. By some estimates, 80 percent of an organization’s data is not numeric! But it still must be included in analyses and decision making.

Velocity. According to Gartner, velocity means “both how fast data is being produced and how fast the data must be processed to meet demand.” Reacting quickly enough to deal with velocity is a challenge for most organizations.³

Incident Management at its core is about capturing, managing and analyzing data to make informed decisions—this same data has grown exponentially in the past few years. The Incident, Investigation and Case Management space is becoming the central repository for such impactful data as it relates to planning counter-measures and making informed decisions. The who, what, when, where and how information of events, incidents, investigations and cases can have profound impact on business decisions that are made outside corporate security.

Never before have we seen the level of enterprise data capture and use of analytics and trending tools being used in security for massive datasets. Perspective has become the end point from all the data that flows in and out of a Security Operations Center (SOC). Video feeds, alerts/notifications, triggers, sensors and alarm data all can have an impact on immediate and future decision making alike.

Perspective is designed to accommodate the variety, volume and the velocity of data being fed into security operations and investigations. The result is a solution that collects, analyzes and reports on security and enterprise data to allow users to make informed decisions.

Key capabilities include:

• Trending, analysis and ad-hoc querying.
• Visual Link Analysis for basic mapping of structured Perspective data.
• Integration to IBM i2 Analytical stack.
• Full text search capabilities throughout the system.
• Dynamic dashboarding.
• Enterprise Investigation and Case Management.

For more information on big data, request our latest white paper, Strengthening Intelligence and Investigations with Incident Management Software. This paper emphasizes intelligence and investigations, and discusses how the right incident management and analytical software can empower security professionals in their efforts to discover and understand information and connections (gain intelligence) and act on (investigate) security incidents that affect their organizations.

—Frank Kennedy, Director of Global Sales

¹ Source: IBM. “Bringing Big Data to the Enterprise,” 2013.

² Source: IDC. “Big Data Analytics: Future Architectures, Skills and Roadmaps for the CIO,” September 2011.

³ Source: SAS. “Big Data – What Is It?,” 2013.

Okay, so Edmonton can be snowy and a little cold sometimes. And when you look at a map, Edmonton looks really far north and may seem like a long distance to travel. But, I promise, it’s not cold all year round, and for those who do come in the winter, you can travel from your hotel to our office without ever setting foot outside—hard to believe but true thanks to Edmonton’s great downtown pedway system.

Now that you’re more comfortable with where we’re located, let’s focus on why you’d consider coming in the first place. Our Edmonton Training Sessions (ETS) are a great opportunity for you to get hands-on with Perspective. It can be so hard to focus on training when you are in the office and have multiple responsibilities and tasks on your plate, and while our Online Training Courses show you how to do things, they don’t give you the same focused, end-to-end learning opportunity that’s offered by an ETS.

Over the past few months, we’ve had the pleasure of hosting clients from all over Canada and the United States and from as far away as Europe and Jamaica. And while the Jamaicans weren’t too happy with the snow (the novelty wore off quickly!), I know that each and every participant walked out feeling more confident in their use and administration of Perspective. From experienced users looking for specific how-to’s, to relatively new users looking to master reports and analyses, to brand new users in need of a complete course… our recent Edmonton Training Sessions helped them all.

Another benefit to coming to Edmonton? You get to meet the team, and we get to sit down with you to discuss how you use Perspective, explore your wish list and answer your questions—as many as you want to throw at us. As one of our recent attendees, Sandor Vastag from the Calgary Exhibition and Stampede put it, “I absolutely enjoyed and got maximum exposure from this course. The trainers took the time to ensure that I fully understood the topics and felt comfortable with what was being presented.” Sandor has been using Perspective for a few years but knew that he didn’t have a handle on everything Perspective has to offer. Now he does!

Our next session runs from May 7^th to May 9^th. I hope you’ll consider signing up! If that’s too soon, there’s always June and July.

For more information on the Perspective Edmonton Training Sessions, please visit our Hands-On Training page…

—Lenora Thomas, Director, Customer Service & Technical Support Services

Another new integration from PPM!

With Perspective Integration Services, we are continuously entering new paths for integration, and we have recently succeeded in an integration with one of the fastest growing companies in the world and one of the fastest growing companies in the security industry—Canada-based Avigilon and the fifth release of their award-winning Avigilon Control Center (ACC) software. It’s really cool stuff!

Perspective Integration Services has the unique ability to listen and subscribe to events, alarms and triggers. ACC has the ability to generate the unique alarms we can listen for and, in some cases, they are tied to other alarm systems such as access control, life-safety or system-based alarms.

So, how does this work and what makes it so unique?

Avigilon cameras and software have many fantastic functions. I won’t even try to cover it here; go see them for yourself, and I guarantee you will be impressed. The screen below is a standard ‘view’ of four cameras within ACC 5.0.

In Perspective DispatchLog, we monitor and action resources, and when an alarm or event is triggered, a call is immediately and automatically generated (called ‘Forced Dispatch’) on the operator’s screen. For example, the screen cap below shows the panic alarm at Building 120, which has popped up on the operator’s screen.

From here, if the location is situated with one or more cameras, Perspective DispatchLog can call the cameras for the event from the Avigilon system directly onto the screen, with the ability to use the native ACC controls to work the cameras. The alarm camera overrides the default view and instantly places the alarm camera view on the screen. In the example below, there is only one camera at the site. If there were more cameras at that location, they would dynamically fill the boxes. The alarm camera is highlighted with a red border denoting its significance.

This real-time view gives the control room operator situational intelligence during the event and, at the same time, he or she can begin to action resources to respond to the call. Because ACC 5.0 allows multiple operators to view and interact with the same layout and interface, by pushing feeds to another command center workstation with both DispatchLog and ACC 5.0 running, users can now react to and review incidents in high definition and control and monitor their responses. Putting the two tools side by side has turned out to be a fantastic command center toolset.

Of course, any video evidence required after the event can be stored in Perspective for easy viewing, or linked back to the ACC system.

PPM and Avigilon are putting this integration in play at one of Canada’s national icons in Toronto so that when a priority alarm is activated at the site, the control operators automatically have a call start on their screen. One or both operators can independently call the video to review and simultaneously resource call response.

What’s most interesting in this partnership is how the teams at PPM and Avigilon have gelled quickly and easily to make things work. In any partnership, you want both teams to ‘play nicely in the sandbox’ and sometimes all does not go as planned. In this case, and in the words of one of our own developers who was instrumental on the project, Isaak Genge, “Avigilon is a dream to work with… Avigilon has bent over backwards and done everything we have asked, mad props to them.” That’s how partnerships need to work.

In addition Avigilon attended PPM’s recent Users’ Conference in St. Pete Beach, Florida and, by all accounts, the PPM-Avigilon integration and partnership was incredibly well-received.

Gary was a busy boy demonstrating Avigilon’s end-to-end solutions while engaging the crowd.

Want to see more? Want to hear more? Hunt out either myself, Frank or Rick at the PPM Booth (#24140) or drop by and see the Avigilon team at Booth 9071 at ISC West this week.

Combine 10 PPM people with 6 PPM partners with 90 Perspective users, and what do you have? PPM’s 2013 Perspective Users’ Conference! Our goal was to deliver as much invaluable content and insight as we could over two days, and… based on all of the feedback I’ve heard so far… we succeeded. To quote one attendee as he walked out of the room on Day One, “That day flew by! We covered so much, I can barely remember the first session now. Thankfully, I took notes!”

Throughout Day One, PPM’s presenters showcased their vision for Perspective and Incident Management in general. Recurring themes included the importance of integration (“as part of an overall security ecosystem”), the relevancy of metrics and analysis and the challenges of accommodating multiple stakeholders (a great example featured here was the challenges of setting up incident classification and how carefully that needs to be managed).

In addition to PPM’s presentations, we were thrilled to feature clients and partners in three of the sessions, the first being our Client Panel. We held this session for the first time last year, and positive feedback instantly guaranteed it a spot in our 2013 lineup. This year’s panel included Rick Steele (Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.); Steve McGowan (Legislative Assembly of Ontario); Ann Hintz (Briggs & Stratton Corporation); and Michael Kelly and Carol Kavish (GTAA). In their one hour session, these five Perspective users shared their experiences about everything from mobility strategies, to PSIM priorities, to security budgets.

Another Perspective user, Owen Key, Chief Security Officer for the City of Calgary, gave this year’s keynote, an entertaining and inspirational look at how a security department can… and should… increase their organizational resilience through a combination of high-tech problem-solving, increased accountability and security metrics.

Immediately following Owen, we did a round of ‘lightning talks’ that featured seven, seven-minute presentations. Everyone was appreciative of the fast-paced and fun dynamic as two PPM presenters (myself and Jeff Sieben, our Solutions Engineer), Adam Harting (of Raytheon Corporation), and four of our partners and Users’ Conference sponsors (Avigilon, Guardly, GDIT and MIR3) took the stage to share just a little of their knowledge. The goal… to give the attendees a little food for thought (maybe prompt an action or two) or to inspire them to follow up afterwards to learn more. What kind of topics were covered? In this order, they were: (1) Project Management; (2) Surveillance; (3) Intelligent Notification; (4) Insider Threats; (5) Mobile Safety Apps; (6) Global Security Operations Centers; and (7) Leadership.

Day Two was dedicated to hands-on training where every attendee had a laptop, and up to four sessions ran simultaneously, catering to the various levels of Perspective knowledge, experience and needs.

As always, my favorite parts of the conference involved interacting with all of the amazing Perspective users in attendance—hearing their take on Perspective is truly energizing. My favourite stories were told by attendees who took their use of Perspective and sold their superiors on why Perspective was the right system—over others being used in other departments and locations—to be taken enterprise-wide. How they combined our promotional material with their actual metrics and analyses was impressive to say the least.

To the attendees who shared their newfound enthusiasm for activity tracking now that they know how they can roll that relatively new component into their Perspective solutions… that’s what this Conference is all about. To the attendee who uses our Metrics & Analysis white paper to tell people “what he does and why it’s so important”… you have no idea how cool that is to hear. To the attendee who’s now made the decision that, yes, switching from on-premise to hosted makes sense, thanks for taking this opportunity to learn more about your options from us… and from the other attendees.

And, last of all, thank you to the spectacular PPM team for pulling the Users’ Conference together. It’s a massive undertaking amidst all of your other projects, and the efforts you take to provide invaluable content and to interact with all of the attendees is really appreciated. Lenora, you have no idea how many attendees singled out your efforts… to quote one discussion, “you’re a star!”

See you next year!

For more on the 2013 Users’ Conference, including the detailed agenda, please click here.

—Elaine O’Sullivan, President & Co-CEO

PPM is proud to announce that our Co-CEO, Brian McIlravey, CPP, will be a presenter at the ASIS International Toronto Chapter’s Industry Leaders Speaker Series on March 21, 2013.

This Industry Leaders Speaker Series brings together Canada’s largest security, investigations, risk and technology companies’ CEOs to discuss the security, safety and investigations industries. It is an amazing opportunity for industry leaders to come together as a collective group to discuss; business sustainability, legislation, private and police relationships, training and education, and the industry’s future.

The session is geared towards anyone who works in safety and security, risk and investigations, or is interested in a career working in any of these fields. It is also applicable to suppliers, consumers, educators and students of these professional services, or media professionals who report on private and public safety, security and investigation matters.

In addition to Brian McIlravey, the following presenters will be in attendance: Mr. Jean Taillon of G4S Solutions Canada, Mr. Dwayne M. Gulsby, CPP, of Securitas Canada Limited, and Mr. Brian D. King, CFE, of CKR Global. The event will be hosted and moderated by Ms. Lina Tsakiris, CPP, Global Security & Investigations, TD Bank Group.

Event Details

• Date: Thursday, March 21, 2013
• Location: Ministry of the Environment Auditorium, 4905 Dufferin Street, Toronto ON M3H 5T3
• Time: Registration 5:30, Dinner at 6:15, Presentation at 7:00 pm
• Cost: $30.00, free parking

For more information and to register: http://www.asistoronto.org/chapter-events/industry-leaders-speaker-series-march-21-2013/

Questions for the presenters will be accepted in advance of the session and can be submitted to: executive@asistoronto.org.

—Cora Bolianatz, Director, Marketing & Communications

We recently announced that our newest product, Perspective’s Lenel OnGuard Connector, has been certified by Lenel for integrating with the latest two versions of Lenel OnGuard. This is a significant milestone for Perspective, and the culmination of a lengthy process that began over two years ago!

We always knew that we wanted to integrate with Lenel. As an access control provider, they’re on the front lines of data collection, and in terms of the access control market, they’re one of the leaders, certainly amongst our client base.

Many of the events that occur—and need to be reported on—begin with an alarm triggered in an access control system. And, given that one of the biggest pain points for any reporting or record management system like Perspective is data entry/collection, it makes sense to pull in data that’s already been collected. As a result, integrating with Lenel to bring in the data that outlines the when, where and what of an event has always made a lot of sense, but as with many integrations, it wasn’t that straightforward.

We started with questions like, “What information should we move over?” and “Where should it be stored?” We quickly discovered that there is a wide range of events monitored by Lenel but only some of them are significant enough to warrant a move into Perspective for documentation and reporting. To further complicate things, for everyone we talked to, the answer on which events to pull over was different. In addition, at detection, it’s just an alarm that requires a response and validation, and we couldn’t create an incident record in Perspective without first collecting more information. Clearly, we’d hit a roadblock. Thankfully, these discussions did lead to some great next steps which we delivered in the form of Perspective’s Integration Services component and the next generation of DispatchLog. We designed both Integration Services and DispatchLog with integration to the PSIM ecosystem in mind, including access control (please see my previous blog on Integration Innovation with DispatchLog).

Now, with Integration Services, we had the channel for easily moving all types of data from one system to another, and with DispatchLog, we had two powerful tools: 1) the ability to respond to actionable events; and 2) the ability to track various security-related activities without crossing into incident reporting requirements. With Integration Services and DispatchLog in place, we were ready to revisit integrating with Lenel OnGuard and, ultimately, able to make it happen.

With Perspective’s Lenel OnGuard Connector, we now have an option that all of our clients with OnGuard systems can leverage to bring data from OnGuard into Perspective. We even created an interface called Perspective Connect that allows each client to tailor the integration for their needs. Connect acts as a real-time interface between Perspective and OnGuard so that when alarms go off, the data is instantly sent to Perspective. Actionable events such as doors forced open or fire alarms can send the information directly to a dispatcher to have an officer respond. Less critical events that need to be tracked, such as invalid card swipes or doors held open, can simply create an activity report so that the frequency and volume of these events can be monitored.

It was a great experience taking an idea shared by so many different clients and finding a way to build an integration that could be installed, configured and functional for any client without the need for custom development. Receiving official certification from our partner was a great way to end this process. We now look forward to planning and delivering additional integrations in the future that are just as easy to connect.

—Ryan Thiessen, Director, Product Management

Most business analysts and end users know all the right questions to ask in order to find an application that matches their business requirements. However, sometimes lost or completely overlooked in the process are fundamental questions that should be asked about the companies that provide those applications. Industry experts tell us that due diligence of the vendor is equally, if not more, important than due diligence of the application.

“If you don’t do proper due diligence, you’re committing your company to a relationship that you don’t know you can rely on. You’re leading your company down a blind alley,” warns Jim Mulvaney, KPMG’s director of forensics and litigation, and manager of its investigative due diligence practice (CIO.com, 2001).

It’s not a complex vetting process to determine if the vendor is the right fit. In fact, there are three simple company-oriented questions you can pose that will get you the information you need to make a sound decision.

Question 1: Ask the vendor to provide details of their company history and market share.

How long has the vendor been in business? What is the breadth of industries the vendor’s customers are in? The number of Fortune 500 customers they have as clients? The total number of installations? Do they show growth? Determine if this company is going to be around for the long run and that you are partnering with a vendor that has sizable market share and adequate resources to support your implementation and support requirements. Stability is key.

Question 2: Ask the vendor about any lawsuits or pending litigation against them.

A smaller vendor with outstanding legal issues may be a cause for concern as this may affect or reveal how they work with customers, employees or other vendors. Your company may also have a corporate policy that prevents you from working with organizations that have litigation filed against them.

Question 3: Ask the vendor to provide three references of similar size and scope.

Proof is in the pudding as they say—and if a vendor cannot provide current customer references of similar size and scope, this may increase the risk of an unsuccessful deployment due to lack of vendor experience and resources.

That’s it! There are many other questions you can ask, but determining if a vendor is a leader in their market, is free of litigation and is able to supply quality references will provide you peace of mind with your decision. Ask these three questions to determine the right vendor to partner with rather than making a decision based solely on application’s functionality and price point, both of which are key elements… they’re just not everything.

—Frank Kennedy, Director of Global Sales
—Peter Mah, Chief Financial Officer

Is the Perspective Users’ Conference right for you?

If you’ve mastered Perspective and have it set up exactly the way you want it so that it’s delivering exactly what you need in terms of analysis, reports and metrics, you’re good… you might get something out of the Conference, but it’s probably not worth any time away from the office.

However, if you haven’t quite mastered Perspective, aren’t 100% convinced that it’s set up and functioning perfectly for your operation and are anxious to learn more about Perspective and how it’s going to evolve over the next year, you should definitely take another look.

At a glance, here are the Top 10 Reasons you should join us in St. Pete Beach on March 18th and 19th:

10. Become a certified Perspective Expert, knowledgeable about the Incident Management theory behind Perspective (Day One) and how to apply that theory (Day Two).

9. Experience interactive, hands-on training with a computer available for each and every attendee throughout Day Two.

8. See the Perspective roadmap… learn what’s next and why.

7. Impact our roadmap… express your priorities and why you agree (or disagree!) with what we have planned.

6. Optimize your Perspective system… you’ve already invested a lot in it, now’s the time to make sure you’re getting everything you can out of it.

5. Focus on the processes and policies that surround your Perspective system and how you can improve them… if you don’t dedicate the time, it won’t happen.

4. Better understand the Incident Management process and how Perspective can be applied to each stage of it… planning, response, documentation and investigation.

3. Learn how to leverage Perspective’s knowledge base to achieve your organization’s risk, performance and intelligence objectives… it’s so much more than a data collection system.

2. Discover the potential for integration and how you can leverage the information tracked and stored in your other security systems. Learn what you need to know to make Perspective a pivotal part of your Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) program.

1. Connect with other Perspective users who share the same challenges you have. Talk about training. Discuss sharing Perspective with other departments. Learn how others have implemented Perspective worldwide. Ask about security and how other companies have mastered data segregation and consolidation. Brainstorm on metrics and the most meaningful ones for senior management (and how to get them out of Perspective!).

Ready to learn more? Our Users’ Conference site has all of the details, and we would welcome the opportunity to answer any questions.

One last thing… and for some companies this does make a difference… we operate our Users’ Conference with the goal of breaking even. It’s about bringing everyone together, not about making money, with our low registration fees covering our costs, nothing more. We want to share our Incident Management and Perspective expertise, and we want to hear what you have to say; for both of those objectives, there’s no better forum than this.

Due to the hands-on training component, space is limited. Please don’t be disappointed… register today!

—Elaine O’Sullivan, President & Co-CEO

Perspective Administrators are responsible for setting up, managing and maintaining the Perspective database—whether it be updating a forgotten user password, adding a new class or keeping an eye on auditing.

This is an important role in terms of how your organization uses Perspective, and there are some key things to take into consideration when determining who your Administrators are and how many you need:

• One Administrator is not enough. Why? Because you never know when they may be sick, on holidays or decide to move on from your company, leaving you with a hole in your use of the system. We recommend a minimum of two Administrators for small set-ups, and two per department for larger set-ups with multiple teams.
• Always make sure your Administrators have been trained. Administrators should know both how to administrate Perspective and how the users are utilizing the system. This way Administrators can help train and explain why things are set up the way they are. PPM offers online and recorded training, hands-on training and our Users’ Conference as options to help get your Administrators up to speed.

One is simply not enough. Multiple Perspective Administrators who understand how you have set up the program make a world of difference, by working together to provide maximum coverage and support your organization and its teams.

Interested in more information about the training PPM offers? Reach out to us at customer.service@ppm2000.com.

—Lenora Thomas, Director, Customer Service & Technical Support Services