What Did We Learn At SecTech Roadshow Australia This Year?
What Did We Learn At SecTech Roadshow – There’s a rawness to SecTech that makes getting a sense of product direction easier than is possible at larger events, where corporate posturing takes precedence over product displays.
At SecTech product is front and centre and what attracts attention is new product – the closer to the bleeding edge the better. You get a seat of the pants feeling for where the new gear is in the room through its resistance to crowd flow, as techs and technical end users drop anchor in front of it.
Operations to one side, the security market is intensely competitive and that makes technologies that interest security installers and integrators even more telling. And there’s an observable tension here, too. Techs have loyalty to suppliers and are drawn to upgrades of familiar solutions, but sometimes a product will transcend this relationship gravity.
Vivotek’s Vortex springs to mind, with its cloud-based analytics leveraging power in data centre racks to deliver fingertip searches to remote devices and workstations that make investigations near real time. We’ve all seen video analytics that can find all the red cars yesterday, but Vortex responds to some very quirky search questions in seriously admirable ways – and via cloud, too. It’s impressive.
There’s still development in the CCTV space, despite the agonies distributors are suffering with shredded margins. At SecTech Australia after events some distributors were talking about margins on surveillance cameras of 6 per cent.
What’s the future for product that’s scraping along at IT margins? There’s not going to be huge R&D from CCTV hardware manufacturers and no matter what they say, CCTV distributors are not going to able to provide boutique levels of service unless they are pitching integrated solutions with survivable margins – think pro cloud and integrated access control.
What does all this mean? Off the cuff, we may see enhanced surveillance technologies appearing in high end sensors and the serious technological leaps of the future may happen in more profitable parts of the typical product spread – alarms, access control and automation. This has been an observable trend for some years.
What Did We Learn At SecTech Roadshow?
We think there will be growth in pro cloud business models. We’ve talked about cloud for a long time and each year it moves closer – 2025 was no exception. Something to note when it comes to security industry cloud is that it’s layered – cloud pokes its nose into different areas of the technological stack. This might depend on whether it’s applied to notifications and management, or whether security solutions drive internal comms through the cloud, or apply it to storage.
A sign of the cloud maturity was an expansion of the number of solutions that onboard third-party solutions to cloud. And for the first time we noticed as many exhibitors showing visitor interfaces on their phones as they were showing on stand monitors.
In Australia, 2G and 3G have been put to sleep in favour of faster 4G wireless comms – New Zealand follows the same path at year’s end. A typical alarm monitoring path has gone from dialler with direct line like Securitel, to 4G with support from dual SIM and dual provider.
Some systems use local networks with 4G back up from single or dual paths. The latest hubs incorporate dual SIM and it’s likely some will soon include eSIM – the appeal there is more seamless integration on the smaller scale, as well as enhanced 4G support for remote sensors, including cameras. The attention Permaconn was getting in Auckland yesterday suggests monitoring remains a vigorous market segment.
Robots and drones – we talk up drones a lot – for larger sites they offer unrivalled oversight and turbocharged situational awareness in times of emergency. The fact we didn’t see much in the way of drones at SecTech told us something – the supplier and integrator market has not come up with an appropriate business model yet.
On the robotics side, CRK showed a bipedal robot at SecTech Oz – its mobility and falling costs suggests the technology continues to make strides towards becoming a useful tool for security departments, especially where it can be sent into situations that might pose a risk for human security personnel.
There’s a hardware element to electronic security solutions – it’s inevitable, given the nature of our solutions, which serve to control access of vehicles and people. At SecTech there were some cool locking solutions to be seen. We liked ASSA ABLOY’s wireless sliding door lock, which gives access control solutions capabilities they didn’t have before.
Aritech is continuing its development of Tecom Discovery. The controller hardware and firmware have been further refined in V3, and a new I/O board has been developed to match. Aritech has done fine work with Tecom Discovery – it’s lovely hardware designed to simplify complex installations. The word is that we can expect a July release for V3.
Something else we’ve enjoyed about SecTech was a significant increase in the number of younger techs and business owners. There are still plenty of the old faces around but it’s been great to see the next generation getting face to face with the latest security solutions.
Relationships remain pivotal in the electronic security industry. This is not surprising – we tend to think that relationships will become even more important as technology continues to evolve. At the same time, there’s a weakness to a fixation with existing connections, in that it can lead a user or installer to ignore worthy new developments that are ‘off-brand’.
We’ve noticed a growing tendency towards proprietary solutions and deeper integrations with trusted partners over the last couple of years. Nothing new – it’s an extension of trends we noticed last year. In one way this delivers more streamlined solutions that are easier to install. In another way, it means techs are more likely to become isolated in a proprietary pool. Clever security integrators and end users, too, will keep a weather eye open for left-field security solutions and system components that are too good to ignore.
Proprietary is a trend notable in wireless alarms that are super-fast to enrol. You’re stuck in the ecosystem and can’t use that one amazing NO/NC wired sensor from a third-party maker to resolve that one intractable operational requirement.
Clever solutions drew attention, even when they were quite simple in execution – ICT’s anti-ligature reader shroud being a case in point. ICT’s new reader is sleek anyway, but the addition of the new shroud is a great look that got plenty of attention from techs.
We didn’t see IR Video at SecTech Australia – that’s something the Kiwis are getting to see at SecTech NZ. It’s hard not to wonder if this development doesn’t suggest a more profitable way forward for integrations of access control and CCTV.
Video intercoms are another area of continuing development, with strong offerings from the likes of Stentofon, as well as some handsome kit from Akuvox. Melbourne-manufactured Trace
The alarm vertical is an area of ongoing development, with multiple manufacturers fleshing out their ranges into home automation, video verifications, video doorbells and more. Ajax always impresses. U-Prox is a capable newcomer. We also liked the Paradox M25 hub and sensor range – BGWT has it in Australia, TSS in NZ. It’s a capable system that leverages an excellent sensor range – expect it to make an impression.
Taken as a whole, 2025 has seen evolution of trends that continue to reshape the security market. What hasn’t changed are operational priorities and the pressure on budgets. Both these imperatives are certain to keep nudging users and security installers towards cloud, AI and wireless.
You can read more about IR Video here or read more SEN News here.
“What Did We Learn At SecTech Roadshow Australia This Year?”
