The GDP growth in Europe has been slow due to a combination of factors including unemployment, geopolitical tensions and a decline in exports due to a slowdown in China and other export destinations. Overall, the World Bank forecasts that GDP growth in the euro area will be 1.6 percent for both this year and next. The 1.6 percent for this year is smaller than the global average 2.4 percent forecasted.
Yet for the security industry in Europe, things are not quite the same: the exhibitors we spoke with during IFSEC 2016 almost unanimously agreed that a more noticeable growth will be seen later this year. “For security, we've seen basically last year we still had some impact in certain markets from the financial crisis. This year we can see that it's basically gone,” said Thomas Lausten, VP of EMEA at Milestone Systems.
According to most companies, demands for security have risen especially at a time when threats of terrorism have become more imminent than ever. “The things that drive our industry are the events that affect people every day,” said Dan Drayton, International Sales Manager at Paxton. “Following recent high profile events, we have found that people are more inclined to use security and access control to protect themselves and protect their employees.”
The incidents in Paris, Brussels and Nice have also triggered stronger demands for analytics that helps raise the user’s situational awareness and accelerate post-event investigations. “Prevent is a big word. It's very hard to say we can prevent something like that,” said Simon Cook, Sales Engineering Manager at Genetec. “How can we improve the time it takes to find trends and patterns, using analytics to actually look for certain behaviors, how can we search the footage to find the perpetrators a lot quicker … that's something that we're aiming to build on. Our goal is to assist our customers in reducing the time it takes from incident to arrest.”
Besides terrorism, Europe is also seeing an influx of refugees who are now spread into various countries. Demands for more advanced identity management technologies, such as biometrics, have therefore risen as well.
“Most governments want to know who is coming in and be able to vet them, as a lot of these people have no information. So they want to at least catalog a person who came in. Even though the name may be wrong, they have a biometric so they can say I see that biometric again, I know it was this person.” said Mark Clifton, President of Products and Solutions at SRI Identity
The presence of criminal activities in general is also driving the need for security. Pyronix, for example, has detected increased demand for its external detectors to keep intruders at bay. “In Northern Italy, for example, a large part of the population lives in countryside villas, and some stats discuss that over the past few years the burglary rates have increased by 20 percent. Local authorities even organize free events for bringing users with installers of alarm systems closer.” said Valeri Filianov, EMEA Sales Director at Pyronix. “Users therefore are much more aware of the availability of intruder protection. We also have seen a large growth of external protection products demand as users learn that it is better to stop the intruder before he is already inside the house.”