ROYAL Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) has selected the Inner Range Infiniti platform as the heart of its 3000-door electronic security upgrade – Integrators Australia has been selected to deliver the solution.
RMIT’s access control demands are considerable – there around 5000 academic staff and 83,000 students and the campus has around 90 buildings, many in the Melbourne CBD, as well as branch campuses in Asia and Europe.
“Being able to work so closely with RMIT has been a real privilege,” said Inner Range’s CEO, Peter Krincevski. “Like any evaluation or sales process, we were just one vendor in the mix. One of the key items that appealed to RMIT was Inner Range’s ability to provide local support and local engineering. What struck me was RMIT’s commitment to this project, especially their meticulous analysis of the various technical and commercial abilities of each vendor and their confidence deciding to move forward.
“You might imagine this process taking years, but the time from initial discussions to a signed contract was only about 6-7 months. This has represented real cost savings to RMIT. Inner Range will continue to play a key role in this project with support and professional services offered to both RMIT and Integrators Australia.”
According to Rusty Blake, business development manager at Inner Range, the technical side of the project is vast.
“The scale of the project is enormous,” Blake said. “RMIT has over 130 buildings, 3000 access control doors and thousands of zone inputs, and Infiniti will also be the single overarching security management system supporting concurrent high-level interfaces with Avigilon (CCTV), Jacques (intercoms), 60x Building Management Systems (BACnet/IP), Traka (KeyLocker), Active Directory and HID (Bluetooth card readers).
“An open REST/XML API within Infiniti will allow RMIT to write a custom interface and tailor the Infiniti software to suit their specific requirements. Another key attribute that Infiniti offers in comparison to most of our competitors is that Infiniti’s hybrid architecture can be both deep with a large RS-485 cabling infrastructure, as well as flat with support for thousands of IP-based door controllers. In the case of RMIT and their extensive RS-485 cabling infrastructure, Infiniti is the obvious choice; being able to reuse their RS-485 cabling has likely saved them millions of dollars.”
Key university staff are also pleased with the expediency of the process.
“We are all benefiting from a close and open partnership that mitigates risk and reduces installation costs and time,” said RMIT security manager, Russell Lightfoot. “Integrators Australia and Inner Range have proven their support and we are excited to be deploying the Infiniti platform.”
Founded in 1887, the RMIT’s city campus was founded as the Working Men’s College of Melbourne. Its original building is on the corner of Bowen Street and La Trobe Street, and the campus has since grown to 87 buildings in 2016. Making access control more vital, the campus has no perimeter walls – its buildings are contiguous with the surrounding city.
Most of buildings are spread across 6 city blocks covering approximately 720,000 square metres bound by La Trobe Street to the south, Elizabeth Street to the south-east and Swanston Street to the north-east (connected by Franklin Street), Queensberry Street to the north, Lygon Street to the north-west and Russell Street to the south-west.
In the leadup to the contract win by Inner Range and Integrators Australia, RMIT said it intended to replace and/or upgrade its existing electronic access control system with a new solution, as well as a warranty and maintenance regime that presented security and value for money to RMIT.
The video surveillance solution at RMIT is Avigilon.
#sen.news #accesscontrol #security #university
