SIA New Member Profile: Rhombus Systems

New Security Industry Association (SIA) member Rhombus Systems works to make work spaces and organizations more secure, intelligent and productive through its intelligent cameras and sensors, securely managed through a single platform. The company is headquartered in Sacramento, California, with team members located across the country and in Canada.

SIA spoke with Garrett Larsson, CEO of Rhombus Systems, about the company, the security industry and working with SIA.

Tell us the story of your company.

Garrett Larsson: Rhombus was founded in November 2016. Previously, most of the founding team was at Sophos, and before that Mojave Networks (developed cybersecurity products for the enterprise), which Sophos acquired in 2014. We got the idea for Rhombus while building other solutions for enterprise IT and seeing how IT was trying to bring most of their other infrastructure to the cloud. We sought out other enterprise IT infrastructure that would experience this same trend and quickly gained conviction that physical security systems (video security, badge systems and other sensors) would be the next industry to move to the cloud. When we started doing some research, we couldn’t believe how dated the technology in this industry was and asked the question, “Why can’t these systems feel like other modern enterprise IT systems?”. As they say, from there, the rest is history.

What solutions/services does your business offer in the security industry? And what makes your offerings/company unique?

GL: Rhombus provides cloud-managed video security and Internet of Things sensors for enterprises to better manage their physical spaces. The platform is plug and play, eliminating the need for complicated hardware like network video recorders or servers. Rhombus leverages the latest artificial intelligence technologies in computer vision to enable powerful features like people analytics, facial recognition and license plate recognition.

The system is architected to be an open platform integrating to other best-of-breed cloud solutions and providing an open API that lets customers and resellers leverage their video data in new ways.

Rhombus sells 100% through the channel, so our products are tailored to enable great experiences for both channel partners and end customers.

What is something we might not know about your company – or something new you are doing in security?

GL: Rhombus has an extremely comprehensive, open API, which has allowed other companies to build innovation solutions on top of ours. This includes locker storage solutions integrating our video, access control solutions integrating cameras, analytics companies providing additional insight off of video and much more. Any data we have we make accessible to our customers and partners to use and build off of. This is an area we’re really excited to see evolve in the future, as we want to enable others to build cool applications on top of us.

What are your predictions for the security industry in the short and long term?

GL: We are big believers that solutions will start moving to the cloud and benefit from open, cloud integrations. This trend will enable end customers to get a lot more value out of what used to be siloed solutions.

What are the biggest challenges facing your company and/or others in the security industry?

GL: Given our background in cybersecurity, this is an area we always see as a big challenge for the industry. Vendors like us need to continually demonstrate that we are providing secure products that are keeping sensitive information private. We’re up to the challenge and constantly working to make our products even more secure.

What do you enjoy most about being at your company – and in the security industry?

GL: The aspect we like most about the industry is that we’re all generally working to make office spaces, schools, buildings and physical spaces safer. It’s a good rallying cry that’s easy to line up behind.

What does SIA offer that is most important to you/your company? And what do you most hope to get out of your membership with SIA?

GL: We hope to connect with security professionals and leaders within the space. More physical security solutions are moving to the cloud, and we would like to share more knowledge around this topic. Additionally, we’re always looking for new systems to integrate with, channel partners that want to provide better solutions to clients and customers that want to upgrade from legacy infrastructure to more modern cloud-based solutions.

The views and opinions expressed in guest posts and/or profiles are those of the authors or sources and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Security Industry Association.