Examining Vanderbilt’s SPC and the age of smart home integration

In today’s technologically driven culture of consumer demand, the integration of products is a massive trump card for company’s looking to whet the appetite of potential customers.

One such wing of this is home automation, and these types of solutions for the consumer market have been changing at a rapid pace. Naturally, this then poses an exciting challenge for the security industry.

With the rapidly growing home automation market, it only makes sense for security manufacturers to align their products with the concept of a smart home. Moreover, this is undoubtedly in demand from homeowners: Due to growing adoption of various types of smart security devices in global households, the global smart home security and safety market is expected to reach $134.5 billion by 2025.

One such product that is reaping dividends in this era, given its vast depth of integration capability, is Vanderbilt’s SPC intrusion system. The SPC intrusion system is designed to be a modular security system that can scale to achieve and support the needs of buildings and homes, providing monitoring for various types of sensors, doors, and submitting multiple user interfaces. With this in mind, Vanderbilt have actively promoted a culture of openness and flexibility that has resulted in the growth of many strategic partnerships. The goal of many of these partnerships is to bridge the gap between the building automation design companies and the security industry to provide flexible platforms that can be retrofitted into systems or designed as a critical element of the system from the beginning.

This allows people to use the home automation system they want securely while making use of the sensors and information available to them within their security system. By working with key partners, Vanderbilt can provide the best overall solution to our customers, and we continue to explore these opportunities and interests to provide the most exciting innovations possible. Integrating a security system within a smart home can create numerous benefits and the ultimate level of efficiency.

Let’s now take a look at some of the smart home solutions that Vanderbilt’s SPC integrates with.

Vanderbilt’s SPC integrates with Dutch company Triplence Technologies’ Aperium box. This has been established through Vanderbilt’s bespoke communications protocol, FlexC. Triplence Technologies’ Aperium box provides a secure network between a customer’s IP devices and a Central Monitoring Station (CMS). The Achilles’ heel of many IP video systems is that they are great for internal use but can provide a security risk when opened to the internet. 

The Aperium box sits in between the IP devices and an authorized receiving end and offers fast, low-bandwidth snapshot images, and high-resolution video streams when necessary for an extensive range of IP cameras. The Aperium box can also use the IP camera Video Content Analytics (VCA) events as an alarm triggers.

When integrated with Vanderbilt’s SPC intrusion panel, it allows for combining intrusion alarm events with VCA verification and combining non-alarm events like Access Denied, Door Forced, and System Armed/Disarmed. Along with a series of snapshot images, this makes the job of the CMS operator more comfortable and increases the standard of security for end-users. Another positive benefit from this integration is that through the Aperium box, SPC can now be combined with a more significant number of IP cameras of various brands, as well as other major brands of Network Video Recorders.

Triplence developed a solution that benefits all parties in our industry: the CMS, the installer, and the end-user by providing a unique combination of Vanderbilt’s SPC intrusion alarm system and a comprehensive range of third-party IP camera solutions. The video content analysis tools found in today’s modern IP cameras can now be an integral part of a secure intrusion alarm system. This is something that has been talked about for years but not seen so far.

The integration of SPC with KNXlogic’s main products means that combining convenience and safety has never been easier. For instance, the blending of SPC into the KNX environment allows the end-user to carry out all functions in one protocol. KNX is a bi-directional gateway that can host SPC features such as event calls, arming and disarming, and retrieving status.

The integration of SPC and KNX is the perfect solution for house and building owners as you can effectively use one system to manage your essential day-to-day activities. The collaboration also means you can automate your daily checklist. For example, you can make one visual map that shows lighting, heating, and your intrusion system. More importantly, you can automate everything.

When you are leaving your house, you might have to make sure that the heating and lights are turned off and that your intrusion system is activated. With SPC and KNX, when you leave the building and arm your SPC intrusion panel, the system is notified that because the building is armed, no one is home. It then automatically knows that it can turn off the lights and put the heating to standby mode.

Essentially, the systems can talk to each other, and everything happens automatically in the background. New technology does not become an additional burden to think of; you can leave the house with peace of mind that your home is secure and safe.

Homey, the smart home platform developed by the Dutch company Athom, has integrated Vanderbilt’s SPC security systems. The integration allows users to use their security system for other purposes too. This is useful in many cases. Take your motion sensors. The sensors you currently use for intruder detection can now also be used to switch your lighting on when you’re at home.

The integration between Vanderbilt SPC and Homey offers a unique best-of-both-worlds combination: EN 50131-certified security, combined with the versatility of the Homey smart home platform.

As the SPC security system operates stand-alone, none of the certifications or assurances are compromised. At the same time, all sensors and data available in the system are available in Homey too, ready to be used in your smart home environment. The best thing about this collaboration is the fact that it allows you to get more out of the sensors you already have. Therefore, it’s not necessary to purchase dual sensors or have parallel systems for both security and smart home.

This allows users to enjoy more comfort and more security, without any duplications in hardware, thus saving resources and money. Enhanced security can be reached by letting Homey automate based on alarm state. For instance, users can create 'Presence Simulation' Flows in Homey, which can be activated upon arming the Vanderbilt SPC alarm. Also, lights, audio, TV, and other connected devices can be leveraged to enhance the alarms built into the Vanderbilt security system.

Since all the sensors of the security system show up in Homey individually, users can easily integrate them into their automation scenarios. They can have lights in the hallway turn on temporarily when motion is detected there, get a notification if a door or window is open for too long, and turn their TV and heating off when the system is armed to conserve energy. 

The idea of a smart home seemed like a far-off, imaginary concept not long ago. Take the Disney Channel Original Movie Smart House, for example, which just celebrated its 20th anniversary and portrayed the ability to connect multiple elements of technology and control them through one device — an action that, at the time, felt improbable.

However, fast forward two decades and the premise behind the movie has come true. Today, we can use our smartphones and tablets in our houses to turn the lights on or off, manage the thermostat, change the TV channel — you name it. Technology has advanced far beyond our predictions to make everyday life more straightforward than ever imagined, which explains why the security industry has found itself shifting toward the smart home trend.

When it comes to the way that today’s security solutions are implemented and used by businesses, such as surveillance cameras, access control systems and intrusion services, the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud have made convenience and remote accessibility easy to achieve. However, these are features that are also desired by homeowners that have chosen to take advantage of home security systems to protect against robberies, vandalism and other residential risks.

Vanderbilt’s SPC solution also integrates with other smart home technologies and systems, showing that the system is ready for the future, which is bright in this regard. With 75% of home security installations in 2017 having included smart control features, it’s clear that this trend is not going away anytime soon, as this collaboration can save costs, increase functionality and improve efficiencies.