asmag has adopted a brand-new matrix for this year’s Security 50 Survey. Instead of asking our readers about technologies separated by the (increasingly porous) boundaries between video security, access control and security technology in general, we created one unified tech survey that asked them directly about how different technologies are affecting their security projects on the ground. While narrowing down our survey on the one hand, we widened it on the other by adding a business climate questionnaire, in which we asked about our readers’ market sentiment right now and going forward, as well as what is driving changes in their project pipeline.

The tech survey: We asked readers three main questions: How strongly are vendors pushing certain technologies, how often do clients ask for them, and how often do they become part of their projects in the end. Through this new matrix—“vendor push” vs. “client pull” vs. “sales reality”—we sought to get an objective image of what technologies are being “hyped,” what technologies are dominant in reality, whether and how those factors align, and what the trajectory might be.

We began, however, by asking our readers what technologies they consider most important. This gave us an overview of the landscape and helped us distinguish between mainstream technologies and technologies that are relevant, but rather in specialized projects. We then asked them about how strongly the individually selected technologies are “vendor-pushed”, “client-requested”, and “really sold.” The reason for this change in our methodology is that we believe an installer who mostly does video security should not be “forced” to talk about technologies they’re not specializing in just to satisfy the technical requirements of the survey. This would also lead to skewed results, and might have done so in the past.

In our interpretation of the results we got for each technology we used a simplified version of the Pearson’s correlation coefficient, or R value, to asses the strength of the respective factor.

For example, let’s say 20 respondents chose Technology A, but all said vendors push it “rarely” on a four-tier scale from “rarely” to “always.” In this case our “R” value would be a minus-1, the weakest value possible. If all of them said “always,” it would be 1, indicating the strongest possible vendor push.

Doing the same for “client pull” and “sales reality,” we got three values for each technology, indicating to what degree the three factors determine their position in the security market.

At the bottom you can find the values for all technologies.

The market survey: Here we asked people about their market sentiment right now and going forward, as well as how fast projects are proceeding. Separately, we asked what market factor is most important in their projects, from regular upgrade cycles to geopolitical stressors. Compared to the tech part, this was pretty straight-forward.

Technologies:

• Edge AI (“No.1 category” mentions: 32, “Top 5” mentions: 38, vendor push:0.69, client pull: 0.51, sales reality: 0.47)
• Unified platforms (12; 30; 0.32; 0; 0.1)
• AI agents (11; 33; 0.52; -0.06; -0.6)
• Large-scale or multimodal AI (10; 21; 0.29; -0.36; -0.38)
• Hybrid cloud architectures (6; 20; 0.2; 0.05; 0.23)
• Cyber physical convergence (5; 20; -0.08; -0.19; -0.04)
• Cloud analytics and management (6; 15; 0.07; 0.08; 0.08)
• 5G (5; 11; 0.18; 0.41; 0.5)
• Legacy hardware integration (2; 12; -0.58; 0.54; 0.63)
• Biometrics in access control (1; 10; 0; -0.35; -0.15)
• Biometrics in video security (0; 10; 0.05; -0.1; -0.1)
• Mobile credentials (2; 3; 0.33; 0.83; 0.83)