DVTel, a five-and-a-half-year-old company that's been focused on IP video, announced at ISC West that the company was making its first major play into IP-based access control.

The company's digital video platforms (the company also deals in IP cameras -- both fixed and PTZ domes) haven't been a stranger to access control. Paul Smith, COO of DVTel says the company has worked to integrate its digital video management systems with companies like Lenel and others. Integrating the DVTel video systems with access control wasn't a rare occurrence either; Smith adds the company has worked up integration links with 14 of the industry's top access control systems, and had used those integration interfaces on a very regular basis.

But despite its success integrating with existing access control system, DVTel was still a company focused on digital video. Thus, it came as a bit of a surprise at ISC West when a portion of the DVTel booth was dedicated to new acquisition SAI Inc., a family-owned access control system vendor from Fishkill, N.Y. The SAI system, despite having just a slightly-bigger-than-regional foothold in the market, brought DVTel a full feature set. It could handle access, visitor management, badging, alarm monitoring and even time and attendance. It was a system that had quietly made a sizable footprint, having been installed in some 4,000 different Verizon equipment offices, to name its most prominent customer.

Despite the company's success with integrating to existing access control systems, something Smith stresses that DVTel will more than happily continue to do in the future, Smith said that the company's philosophy and desire to see full integration pushed them toward the access control acquisition.

"We felt we could really do well if we had a company to tie together with on access control for iSOC," said Smith. The iSOC is the company's "intelligent Security Operations Center" platform, which merges control over video, audio, access control, visitor management, credential creation, analytics and alarm monitoring.

So about a year ago, DVTel started quietly shopping for an access control system provider. The goal, as Smith says, was to link all the video data with the access control and alarm monitoring data to give rich information from a total security system. On their list of "wants" were two chief requirements. The first was that the access control platform must meet DVTel's network/IP-centric philosophy. Secondly, says Bruce Doneff, who handles the company's public relations, they were looking for a company that was hardware agnostic.