“HID sees lot of opportunities coming around from physical security”

Ranjit Nambiar
Director – Sales, South Asia,
HID Global

Committed to enhance customer value by delivering the most-trusted, advanced and dependable secure identity solutions in the market, HID Global has been present in the surveillance market for more than 15 years and it has established strong channel and end-user presence. HID Global has people across all the major cities in India from a sales perspective. So HID not only takes care of the sales function, but it also has technical support, marketing, finance, customer support and all of these are managed from India itself. And, I think this is one of the key differentiators that have created a strong brand for HID in the market space.

HID’s presence in the Indian market 

Overall, the market size for security is US$500 million. The video surveillance or CCTV is roughly about 40% of the overall market. Access control is about 25% of the market. The rest is between fire and intrusion systems. As per the latest IMS report, the access control product market in India is pegged at about US$70 million. Another statistic that might interest you is that the SME market is catching up, but there are a lot of options available from the Chinese, Korean and the Taiwanese makes.

HID has three different categories. The first is the physical access control segment. HID’s access control portfolio. The second one is called the secure issuance which is the FARGO printer. The third one is IT authentication. The physical access control system which is our core business has cards and readers, controllers, and visitor management software. 

Key innovation on which HID Global is betting big 

HID is now moving toward the mobile access control, wherein it has created a new range of physical access readers which is the iClass SE range and is NFC-enabled. Another trend which it is eyeing is the communication protocol between the reader and the controller is going into a closed loop of high-security communication protocol. This means that it is important to protect the network and focus on network security, because at the end of the day, the access control is also sitting on the IP network and people need to make sure that foreign elements are not able to penetrate their system. Ranjit Nambiar, Director – Sales, South Asia, HID Global, explains, “The key trend is moving from analog or serial-based access controller to IP-based access controller. This trend is also happening on the video surveillance side. Another trend is the demand for higher security layer of the card readers. More and more enterprise customers want a custom-configured card reader which security they can control.” 

Today, people are using cards for access control; tomorrow, they can start using their mobile phone for access control. That is largely the reason that HID is moving in that direction because most of the smartphones available in the market today are NFC-enabled. 

Another trend is the communication protocol between the reader and the controller is going into a closed loop of high-security communication protocol. This means that it is important to protect the network and focus on network security, because at the end of the day, the access control is also sitting on the IP network and people need to make sure that foreign elements are not able to penetrate your system. 

HID’s technology platform is RFID. RFID has multiple applications and usage. The communication protocol between the card and reader is happening on RFID. Apart from that, RFID is widely used for transport systems such as metros, etc. RFID is also used in the supply chain industry, cashless payment. Electronic RFID chips are used in government to citizen programs such as passports, electronic national ID cards. HID also has a business called identification technology which focusses on the areas of RFID.

HID’s Major clients in India

In the IT/ITeS space, Infosys is one of the big clients, which uses HID solutions for physical access control, FARGO printing, IT authentication, tracking and canteen application. It also has Wipro, Cognizant technologies, Google, Dell, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon, JP Morgan, Cisco, Deloitte, Deutsche Bank, etc. HID is also serving SBI, ICICI, HDFC Bank, NTPC, Gas Authority of India, Delhi, Hyderabad, Cochin and Bangalore airports as its major clients.

HID’s channel strategies for India

HID has been present in India for the past 15 years, but it has been operating in the Indian market for more than 10 years. It has a strong channel-centric model. Regarding the channel strategy with respect to the physical access control security, it has two types of partners. It has large global and building automation companies which are partners to HID in the likes of Honeywell, Siemens, Tyco, Bosch, Schneider, Bosch, Wipro, FCL, TCL, UTC, etc as building automation and security companies. Ranjit Nambiar adds here, “These are the people who are doing the project with the end-customers. They basically work on large projects, enterprise projects, where they will provide end-to-end solutions to the customers, including building automation, fire, video surveillance, CCTV and access control. So when it comes to access control, they partner with HID and mostly it is an exclusive partnership.”

Future plans for the Indian market

HID sees a lot of opportunities coming around from the physical security and the convergence of physical and IT security. That is one of the drivers or differentiators on the enterprise side. Besides this, HID is also planning to launch new products.

On the channel side, HID believes in a more consolidated approach. Recently, it internalized a program called “Partner Enablement Program”. It has shortlisted about 50 partners for this program nationally, and there are a lot of special schemes, special prizes, training programmes, certification, etc to develop the next layer of 50 partners. Over a period of time, the idea is to keep adding more partners annually, who are self-sustained and adequately enabled to do their business. Also, HID is planning to come out with new biometric series of readers, towards the end of the year. 

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