With last week's $22 million acquisition of PSIM/situation management technology firm Orsus, NICE Systems picks up what public safety division president Chris Wooten thinks is the future of high-end security projects.

"Where customers place value is not whether you can capture the information, but what you can do with it," explained Wooten, who has been with NICE since 2002 and who assumed leadership of the company's public safety division in 2006. "They ask, 'How can you take that info and make me more effective at what I do?' For security, the information can come from many different sources," Wooten said. "NICE has had the domain experience on the video surveillance side of the business, and what this allows us to provide to the customer is a more complete solution for high-end, more complex applications."

That's the model he sees for Orsus, which provides situation management technology to help companies integrate a number of separate security technology and sensor systems into a platform that can also automate security workflow procedures. Sensors points could be everything from traditional security sensors platforms (intrusion, access control, video surveillance) to building controls and automation systems to specialized systems (gas and CBRNE detection, for example) to even IT/network security systems.

Part of the unique value proposition of Orsus was that NICE saw the company as being "a step higher" than physical security information management by combining PSIM with the aforementioned workflow process management. Wooten added that Orsus had the largest number of installations among the PSIM companies that NICE looked at (and he said that they considered all the players before making this acquisition).

Who buys Orsus solutions and how is it used?

Orsus has some typical customer models, said Wooten. The first would be a business or organization that has installed a high number of unique systems -- often in different facility locations -- that need to share information. A second characteristic customer might be a company that has a dominant legacy system in place which they need tied in with a newer technology platform. The third typical customer need is a company that "has too many systems and wants a single point of truth" for analyzing data, alarms and security information.