ICS Today

Today’s extensive availability of wide bandwidth and reliable communications fostered the re-emergence of centralized computing as a strategy for corporate acquisition of critical IT and business applications services.  This approach reduces costs for expensive computing technology and reduces  the need for hard to find technical personnel. These centralized services, typically called Cloud Services, include access to powerful applications or SaaS (Software as a Service), access to comprehensive IT infrastructure or IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and access to computing platforms for application delivery called PaaS (platform as a Service). 

Cloud services are the preferred delivery mechanism for critical business functions such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning), HRM (Human Resource Management), and CM (Content Management).  This service industry is estimated by the Gartner Group to be $12.1B in 2011 growing to be 21.3B in 2015.

EnterpriseSMS® extends the domain of SaaS into managing the operation of the enterprise’s technology in real time or Enterprise Operations Management (EOM).  Systems including SCADA, HVAC, power, communications, lighting, product inventory, and any other technology critical to an enterprise may be monitored, analyzed, reported upon, and controlled through EnterpriseSMS®.  This emerging market will extend the scale of SaaS applications worldwide.

ICS Market Focus

ICS packages its products to meet the needs of its partners and works to help them lead their market segments.  EnterpriseSMS® is in some sense a tool kit for capturing, calibrating, storing, analyzing, and presenting information in real time.  ICS’s services are based on incorporation of existing field proven software components into customer specific solutions.  Using this approach, ICS has three market foci.

Market Segment Specialized Partners Use ABR Solutions Provides Branded Private Cloud Services To Expand Their Business

ABR Solutions supports market segment specialized partners by providing EnterpriseSMS® software adapted to partner requirements as private cloud services or proprietary solutions.  Typically, these partners are capable integrators with a market focus that EnterpriseSMS® can serve.  As a service, ABR Solutions can provide the infrastructure and core software, technical support for the core components and adaptation services to meet partner requirement.  Partners provide company management, sales and marketing, customer support and deployment services for the solution thereby leveraging EnterpriseSMS® technology and intellectual property to expand their business.. 

Qualified Projects  Can Utilize ICS’s Professional Integration and Design Services  To Solve Their Unique Problems

ICS provides professional services to design solutions, configure and customizes software as needed to realize unique requirements, and provides deployment services for the software where needed.  ICS routinely teams with leading subject matter experts to ensure that solution designs are appropriate and that the end results are robust.

Technology Innovators Use EnterpriseSMS Components To Create Branded Integration Software That Support Their Innovations

ICS works with technology innovators to assist their product development.  Technology innovators can use ICS services to acquire the needed software to make their products more marketable.  In these cases, ICS might provide the consumer interface software needed to make it easy for customers to incorporate the new product into their solutions.  In other cases, ICS will participate in the product creation process by developing software that completes the product in addition to creating the consumer interface software.

History

ICS was created in 1993 as a spin-off of Knight O’Connor and Associates, an 11 year communications and security consulting and services organization.  The late 80’s and early 90’s in the US saw an increase in large scale, complex security projects funded by the government.  The software, EnterpriseSMS®, was initially developed by Knight O’Connor and Associates in response to this opportunity.  It was based on an existing product that had been used by many Federal agencies over the preceding 15 years.  The software product was spun off to ICS, which was created to develop and market software for such very large integrated security solutions. 

One of the areas of opportunity available for funding was airports, so ICS joined with market knowledgeable partners and Airport Systems Group was created to pursue that market.  Airport Systems Group worked with a variety of large integrators (Johnson Controls, Landis Gyr Powers, TRW Integrated Systems, Cochran Electric, National Guardian, Lewis Electric) to provide integrated security solutions for airports including Chicago O’Hare Airport, Seattle’s SEATAC, Houston Intercontinental Airport International Terminal, Hobby Airport, and Memphis International Airport. The software used by Airport Systems Group was developed by ICS and became the foundation for EnterpriseSMS®, ICS’s core product.  The software was provided under license and installed on owner provided computing platforms at their sites.

During the 90s, ICS continued to develop software for advanced high-end integrated systems for major access control manufacturers and integrators including Cardkey Systems, AMAG (now known as G4 Systems) and Johnson Controls.  High visibility projects included: DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration), Honolulu International Airport, National Defense Identity System (Canada), and Work Safe BC.

At the end of the 90s, ICS developed an access control panel that was PC based.  Working with Ottawa Security and Communications, a government centric integrator in Ottawa Canada, this panel led to new market opportunities including the Canadian House of Commons, the Senate of Canada, Natural Resources Canada, Health Canada, and many other federal Canadian Agencies.  EnterpriseSMS® was deployed at many additional sites in the US including Kahului Airport on the island of Maui in Hawaii and Ameren Electric Power of Missouri and several Federal Reserve Banks.  Meeting the diverse requirements of these and other enterprises provided direction to ICS’s efforts to expand its capabilities.  During this time ICS greatly expanded support for special devices and developed software that enabled the wide, geographical distribution of its services to create much larger high-availability systems.

During the early 2000s, ICS extended EnterpriseSMS®, its historic, high-availability, multi-technology software, to include numerous other enterprise activities.  This included the industrial, environmental, infrastructure, communications, and security monitoring and control. It was distributed to public sector and private enterprises. 

Today, EnterpriseSMS® collects and calibrates data from any kind of enterprise technology, stores this data and develops information from it, process the information to produce high-value, actionable intelligence, and presents the intelligence in real-time that enables users easy control over their underlying technologies and subsystems.  Thus, EnterpriseSMS® creates actionable business intelligence and provides real-time user control over the enterprise.  These capabilities provide agility to the enterprise.