Ask a market analyst to estimate the size of the integration opportunity presented by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 12 and you can hear a hint of "You've got to be kidding" behind the non-answer. And you will get a non-answer, because no one knows how massive the job of integrating physical and logical access security across federal agencies will be. But they say it will be huge.

"Let's put it this way," said Alan Webber, senior analyst at Forrester Research. "The only thing in the next 10 years besides this integration that might have a bigger dollar value is probably the enterprise resource planning systems that [agencies] are putting in place."

HSPD-12 poses such significant opportunities for integrators because it poses such significant challenges for agencies. And many of the incumbents the companies that build physical access control systems to protect government facilities are facing a brand-new reality.

"A lot of the physical access community hasn't woken up to what HSPD-12 means and how obsolete a lot of their stuff is going to be," said Jeremy Grant, vice president for enterprise solutions at Reston, Va., integrator Maximus Inc.

But they're about to.

ONE GIANT STEP

Webber and others agree that overhauling physical security, the quintessential stovepipe system, will be the first major step in building HSPD-12-compliant systems. Expanding security controls to enable them to handle access to computer resources as well as physical security will be a future integration project.

Not surprisingly, much of the focus both in and out of government is on how HSPD-12 affects whats already installed. Last November, the Physical Access Interagency Interoperability Working Group revised a document called Technical Implementation Guidance: Smart Card Enabled Physical Access Control Systems. And earlier in the fall, industry trade group the Smart Card Alliance put out its own guidance: An Overview of the Impact of FIPS 201 on Federal Physical Access Control Systems. (Federal Information Processing Standard 201, published by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, describes the specifications that HSPD-12 systems must meet.)

The physical access security industry has been anxious to see FIPS 201 implemented, said Randy Vanderhoof, executive director of the Smart Card Alliance. Every government agency has some type of physical access system in place now, so it's going to require a lot of change.