Combination of digital access and property experience delivers seamless experience for building staff and occupants.
by: Ginger Schlueter
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FALLS CHURCH, Va.—Kastle Systems International, a provider of managed security solutions and services, and Rise Buildings, a provider of an integrated proptech platform that manages all daily activities of a buildings’ staff and occupants, recently joined forces to integrate Kastle’s digital mobile access credential functionality with Rise Buildings’ occupant experience app.
“Access control is an obvious extension of the full ‘occupant experience’ that Rise Buildings provides, but access control and security are highly specialized functions, and to build the expertise themselves, in-house, could require a big investment and long-term commitment to a function that wasn’t their expertise,” Todd Burner, SVP product, Kastle Systems told SSN during an interview.
Digital access credentials for property occupants were embedded within Rise’s property experience platform. This strengthened the offering by integrating managed access and security capabilities along with other features including rent payment processing, package delivery notifications and pickups, maintenance requests, pre-authorized visitor access, amenity usage reservations and more.
“With Kastle, they [Rise Buildings] felt they had a proven mobile BLE [Bluetooth low energy] platform enabled by an SDK,” Burner said. “When combined with Kastle’s long and successful record of providing remote ‘managed security’ solutions as an external partner to thousands of clients around the world Kastle seemed like an ideal choice.”
Kastle Systems’ Mobile SDK program ensures BLE-enabled mobile access control is available for any customer on whichever app they choose. “Kastle’s SDK provides an easily adaptable technology that integrates with Rise Buildings’ existing app frameworks, with the added flexibility to accommodate either multifamily or commercial functional requirements on a single platform,” Burner explained.
In addition, Kastle’s “single-app strategy” responds to the trend toward giving the end user exactly what they want: a single menu for all individual functions that make up the entire experience. “They don’t want a different app for each separate operation, so strategically it makes sense for us to make our function available as one feature/function within a broader single app menu as opposed to creating one of several stand-alone apps,” said Burner.
Recent reports from Gartner, Inc. predict a rapid migration to cloud-based physical access control systems (PACS) and mobile credentials. For example, Gartner predicts that by 2020, 20 percent of organizations will use smartphones in place of traditional access control cards. “Mobile access is very user-friendly and can be a much more security option,” Burner said. “Additionally, the ubiquitous integration of the smartphone into more aspects of everyday life make it an incredible convenience for users on a device they already consider utilitarian and ‘always-on-hand.’”