The physical security industry is shifting towards the use of IT products to deliver their solutions to the market. As a part of this shift large physical security manufacturers like Tyco, Milestone, Pelco and Honeywell are building the next generation security hardware solutions on mainstream IT platforms from Dell, IBM, HP and others. These traditional security manufacturers see the opportunity to outsource certain aspects of their product lines in order to focus on other core competencies. In many ways, the physical security industry has always integrated different components under a single manufacturing brand. So it is not much of a surprise that as physical security and enterprise IT converge the traditional electronic suppliers are being replaced with core IT manufacturers.
This strategy has several benefits that dramatically improve the quality of physical security solutions. Dell, specifically, has been active in the physical security marketplace and has even published a case study profiling their manufacturing partnership with Tyco. Other companies have been influenced by this trend as well. For example, Milestone has a similar relationship with both HP.