Author: Albert Steed
Company: TrueIPSolutions
What is the triple play and how do the three systems work together?
How does integrated paging work in large facilities?
What security features can be integrated with the phone system?
How does this approach save money compared to separate vendors?
Beyond Just Phone Systems
Most businesses think about their communication needs in separate pieces. Phone system here, security cameras there, maybe some door access control somewhere else. But Albert Steed from True IP Solutions has discovered something powerful: when you integrate voice, security, and paging systems together, they create what he calls “the triple play.”
“We actually manage voice over IP, so your phone system, then we do security and access control. So if you want badge access, you want video cameras, all of those different things. And the last piece is paging.”
These three systems really all start to interplay together. Your phone system can talk to the door access control. Your paging system integrates with both. Instead of managing three separate vendors and three separate problems, you get one unified solution.
How the Systems Work Together
Here’s a real example of how the triple play works in action. If you’re a building and you don’t have somebody that can see the front door, but you don’t want people coming in and out, True IP puts a video call box. It then shows up on the screen on your phone at your desk, and then you can talk to them.
You can see them. You can talk and then you just click a little button on the touch screen that says unlock the door and then they get to come in.
The integration goes even deeper. In school systems, True IP does a lot of business installing access control on doors and prop alarms on doors. You might not think prop alarms are a big deal, but when you start thinking about school safety, sometimes it’s really easy to just want to kick a chair into the door to hold it open because you have got some people in the back of the school. In an emergency, you don’t want that door to be held open anymore.
The system can alert you that your door is being held open when it shouldn’t be.
Real World Applications
True IP does a lot of large school education and government style implementations where they can integrate in with overhead paging from a warehouse standpoint or an entire building standpoint.
They just had a really cool implementation with a food bank in North Carolina. The food bank has got almost a 120,000 square foot refrigerated warehouse that’s 45 or 60 feet tall ceilings.
True IP helped them redo their paging system inside of there so that if they needed to make alerts or messaging outside in that warehouse or the larger piece of the building where they have food kitchens and classes and everything else, they had a unified communication system that works not just on phones but overhead paging from a safety standpoint.
Safety and Security Integration
Since True IP does a lot of work inside of school systems, they’re very big into installing access control on doors, prop alarms on doors, and video cameras. All of their employees have kids that are in school systems. They love to see the grant money that goes into schools to help secure those. That’s really where their team loves to go in to put in door access control, proper alarms, safety systems, and security cameras.
The company has started partnering with a company that does active gun detection. They don’t have to have anything new or special. They can run on any IP camera and it’s a box that you subscribe to that uses an AI feed that looks for a threatening manner of a gun somewhere on campus.
Typically a campus may have a hundred cameras. They’ll take their parking lot cameras and put it in that system. So if somebody starts walking around into the door with a gun brandished, it’ll go ahead and auto alert, give them the ability to start lockdown procedures before somebody even gets inside on site. Now you start talking response time.
Why Integration Matters for Business
When you think about it from a business standpoint, having separate systems means separate support calls, separate vendors to manage, separate contracts to negotiate. With the triple play approach, you have one partner for all three critical communication and security needs.
True IP wants to be a great partner for their customers. They want customers to know that if they have something going on inside that world that they can ask them. Even if it’s something they may not specialize in, they have great partners of people that they work with that are very complimentary to things that they do.
They want to be a little bit of an influence hub for their partners so that maybe it’s something customers are just not aware of and they can bring some new solution to the table that they’ve never seen.
The Technology Behind It
The systems use IP-based technology, which means everything runs over your internet connection rather than requiring separate wiring and infrastructure for each system. Your voice over IP phones, your security cameras, and your paging system all use the same network infrastructure.
This approach takes all of the individual pieces of hardware and things that your IT people were hosting in a closet somewhere and maintaining, and you move all of that over to the cloud. True IP has five different data centers across the US that guarantee their servers are up from their SLA standpoint.
Implementation Flexibility
True IP will do as little or as much as you want them to do. There’s no change in their price. There’s nothing else they’re going to do differently for you.
They have clients that want them to come on site and help them. They have other clients that have full big IT teams and they want to handle it themselves. They look at customers and say they will do as little or as much as you want them to do. If you want to handle moves, changes, and setting up all of your different systems and users, power to you. They’ll train you. But if you don’t want to deal with it and you just want to pick up the phone or shoot an email and say you need something right now, they’ll take care of that for you too.
Getting Started with the Triple Play
The best way to reach out is to go to TrueIPSolutions.com. They have a contact form, phone information, and email information. They’re happy to come out and visit. Albert might even fly out and visit you, depending on where you’re at.
Their main geographic area right now is North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia and Florida. They have technicians down the East Coast. But depending on what they’re doing, they’ve been to Chicago, Texas, Iowa, and South Dakota doing projects for their large customers.
Whether you need just one piece of the triple play or all three systems working together, True IP Solutions can design a solution that fits your specific needs and budget. Don’t manage three separate vendors when you can have one trusted partner handling your voice, security, and paging needs.
