Intersec Global 2027: How to Compare Control-Room, Fire-Safety and Resilience Solutions

Separate the three purchases before you compare anything

The first preparation step is accepting that you are managing three independent projects with different economics and different acceptance tests. A control-room purchase is made to bring video, access, alarms and response into one operating point. A fire-safety system is bought to detect a fire, protect people and support evacuation within regulatory timeframes. Resilience, by contrast, is not a single product but a management capability: anticipating disruption, keeping critical operations going and recovering.

The organiser has built the show around exactly this separation. Intersec Global's site lists distinct domains — surveillance and physical security, fire/rescue/emergency response, and cyber security and resilience — each with its own buyers and specialists. Your walking route should follow those domains rather than vendor brand lists. A useful habit before requesting any demonstration: write down one scenario question — what the system must do in a specific incident (a smoke event, a lost perimeter link, a failed critical service) — and test that scenario at the stand rather than admiring marketing demos.

• Three projects = three budgets, timelines and acceptance criteria
• Write one incident scenario per category before meeting vendors
• Plan your route by show domain, not by exhibitor alphabetical order

Control rooms and command centres: what to test on the floor

Here the value lies less in wall hardware than in ergonomics and integration. International standard ISO 11064-7 sets out principles for evaluating control centres: it covers the control suite, the room itself, workstations, displays and controls, and the working environment, and applies across process industry, transport and emergency-dispatch rooms. In plain terms, you should judge whether an operator can read information without overload and act reliably under stress, not just count advertised pixels.

If you are looking at PSIM-class platforms (physical security information management), ask how the product integrates with your existing CCTV, access control, intrusion and fire systems, whether it supports open interoperability standards, and how it scales in users, devices and sites. Practical vendor questions from the sector: how fast the system processes events in real time and shows them on one interface, whether mobile and remote access exist, how high availability and disaster recovery are guaranteed, how intuitive the interface is under load, and how data protection and role-based access are handled.

• Demand a live demo built on your scenario, not a static deck
• Check the 'event → operator task' path and response time
• Ask for availability SLAs and redundancy procedures
• Assess ergonomics against ISO 11064-7: lighting, noise, consoles

Fire safety: active systems, passive protection and testing

Compare across two axes. Active protection includes detectors, alarm and control equipment, automatic suppression, and voice evacuation. Passive fire protection covers fire-resistant structures, fire doors and penetration sealing — measures that contain a fire without activating. Intersec Global hosts a dedicated passive-fire conference led by the Association for Passive Fire Protection (ASFP), where the profession discusses why passive protection still fails in real buildings and how to close the gap between testing, certification, installation and in-service compliance. Treat that as a signal: passive fire protection belongs in your specification on equal footing with 'smart' detectors.

Judge total lifecycle, not equipment price. In Russia the reference is GOST R 59638-2021 on fire alarm systems, which governs design, installation, commissioning, operation, maintenance and performance-testing methods; internationally the role is played by NFPA and local codes. Ask each vendor: which certifications are valid in your jurisdiction, who performs scheduled inspections and performance tests and at what frequency, how deficiencies and impairments are logged, and how the system behaves when the communication link or power fails.

• Split budget between active systems and passive fire protection
• Require current certifications recognised in your jurisdiction
• Ask about the maintenance regime and performance-test methods
• Clarify behaviour on communication or power failure

Resilience: a process you buy, not a device you install

Buying 'resilience' usually means selecting a methodology, a partner and planning tools rather than a standalone unit. Intersec Global 2027's business-continuity programme is led with partner BCI (Business Continuity Institute), the professional body that develops continuity and resilience practitioners. A useful filter for exhibitors: can they show how their offer supports business-impact analysis, recovery plans for critical services and recurring scenario-based exercises — or do they only hand you document templates?

For sites and territories with critical infrastructure, resilience planning approaches such as the framework developed in the US by CISA are a useful reference. The practical criteria: does the approach account for dependencies and cascading failures across systems, help set recovery priorities, and assign clear owners for each step? Remember that resilience cannot be 'installed and forgotten'. Its value comes from a repeating cycle — analyse, plan, exercise, review the after-action report, revise the plan — so weight the partner's capability to run that cycle far more heavily than the size of its licence estate.

• Ask how the offer supports business-impact analysis and recovery plans
• Check whether cascading failures and system dependencies are covered
• Demand exercise scenarios, not just document templates
• Judge the partner on team competence in running the resilience cycle

One weighted scorecard instead of comparing apples and oranges

Once you have tested each category on its own criteria, consolidate the results into a single decision matrix with weights. This lets you make objective choices without forcing comparisons across incomparable categories: ergonomics weight is highest in a control-room project, certification and lifecycle weight in a fire project, and exercise and recovery weight in a resilience project. The finished matrix shows at a glance which vendor wins on the combined evidence and where an advantage is only cosmetic.

Fill one scorecard sheet per vendor within 15–20 minutes of each demo while impressions are fresh, and record evidence rather than promises: what data was shown, which certificates were produced, what support and lead times were quoted. Agree in advance who on your team owns which category so a single person is not scoring all three. After the show, reconnect with two or three finalists per category and request commercial proposals itemised into licences, hardware, deployment and annual support — only then is the comparison truly objective.