IN THE BOARDROOM™ with...

Mr. Mike Taylor
Vice President of Americas Marketing
Honeywell Building Solutions
www.honeywell.com/buildingsolutions
NYSE:HON

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thank you for joining us today, Mike. Please give us an overview of your background and your role at Honeywell Building Solutions.

Mike Taylor: Thanks for having me. I currently serve as vice president of Americas marketing for Honeywell Building Solutions, a business unit of Honeywell that installs and services systems that keep facilities safe, secure, comfortable and energy efficient.

In this role, I am responsible for overall strategy, marketing, product management and training in North and South America. I’ve been with Honeywell for more than 25 years, and have held a variety of sales, marketing and general management positions.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Congratulations on the recent announcement regarding the selection of Honeywell Instant Alert® for Schools by the Lamar School District in Texas. Please give us an overview of the Instant Alert service.

Mike Taylor: Instant Alert is a Web-based notification service that gives administrators a way to send clear, consistent messages to thousands of families within minutes via phone, cell phone, pager, e-mail and PDA. Schools can use the service to update parents on both critical and everyday issues, including emergencies, bus delays, event cancellations and even report cards. Compared to the time- and resource-intensive phone trees and flyers many districts use to deliver information, Instant Alert can send 100,000 30-second phone calls in 15 minutes and more than 6,000 text messages per minute.

To use Instant Alert, a designated school representative initiates a message through a secure Web site or by phone. The message is instantly relayed to all contact points provided by parents or guardians. Parents can update their contact information online and specify how they want to be reached — e.g., e-mail for a routine message, and e-mail and cell phone for emergency communications. In addition, Instant Alert allows schools to develop an unlimited number of subgroups, including sports teams, clubs, parent organizations and grade levels, and send customized messages to these groups.

Teachers and administrators also can send alerts to individual parents, which can help combat truancy and, as a result, increase school budgets.

The service was launched in 2004 and is currently used by schools in almost 30 states. Its quick adoption is due to the fact that Instant Alert takes the guess work out of where and how to reach parents — a growing concern for schools in today’s mobile society. And because it’s Web based, districts don’t have to install any hardware, software or additional phone lines, keeping costs low.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Are there any success stories you’d like to talk about?

Mike Taylor: One feature mentioned above is that Instant Alert can automatically notify parents of students who aren’t in school. Most districts do this manually and place one call, to a home phone. This takes a lot of time and isn’t always effective because many families don’t have someone at home during the day. So a voice message is left and, on occasion, it’s “accidentally” erased before a parent hears it.

Instant Alert can reach parents wherever they are — at work, at home or somewhere in between. As a result, both parents and students make attendance more of a priority. Plus, many states base school funding on attendance so more students in class means more dollars.

For example, Newport Independent Schools in northern Kentucky used Instant Alert for truancy notification, which helped the district reach its highest attendance rate in 50 years. Its 1.5 percent bump in average daily attendance generated $80,000 in additional state funding. And the district was able to hire an additional administrator with the budget increase. So the return on investment for Newport has been phenomenal.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Honeywell is one of the top names in access control, fire & safety, and security systems. Please give our audience an overview of the complete menu of solutions that Honeywell offers in these areas?

Mike Taylor: Honeywell has a full portfolio of offerings in these areas, including access control, digital video, security management, smoke and fire detection, and emergency notification. And our Security and Life Safety businesses are widely recognized as industry leaders.

At Honeywell Building Solutions, we take these innovative technologies and integrate them into a larger building management platform for our customers. As a result, facility managers can view and control all building functions — security, life safety and HVAC systems — from a single workstation. This helps boost efficiency and reduce operating costs.

Honeywell has worked at Fort Wainwright for more than 25 years, providing building, fire and security controls for a variety of facilities. The new security system will be linked to the other security and building systems throughout the base with Honeywell Enterprise Buildings Integrator (EBI), a management platform that integrates core functions for simplified monitoring and control. With this integrated, base-wide network, Army personnel can access and manage any system in real time from any workstation.

The security system includes cards and readers that will help control access to various parts of the building, as well as entrances. In addition, the hospital is using patient protection technology for infants and other people who require additional safety measures. Employing tags equipped with infrared (IR) and radio frequency (RF) technology, hospital personnel can track the location of patients and take action if a baby is moved outside the maternity ward, for example.

Honeywell also installed its Digital Video Manager (DVM), a digital closed-circuit television system that will tie together all camera and surveillance functions. DVM allows hospital staff to view, record, play back and store video clips from a single workstation anywhere on the base. If someone triggers an access control alarm at the hospital by trying to enter a specific area without authorization, for instance, security personnel can easily pinpoint the exact location and view the associated clip. They will spend less time looking for clips and tracking activity, which will significantly improve productivity.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: What is your perspective on the market drivers for Honeywell Building Solutions at this time?

Mike Taylor: A key movement in the market is the convergence of technologies allowing for a single, cockpit view of everything that’s happening in a building or across a campus. Integration helps organizations assess, manage and investigate a security event quicker and with greater precision. Ancillary benefits include the insight and information to be able to optimize energy consumption, comfort and safety.

That said, it’s not just a technology issue. Central to effective integration — and maximizing the return on investment — is doing a “needs assessment” up front, designing systems to increase efficiency, and then properly servicing the systems and equipment post-installation. The biggest failure mode we see today is that organizations want to capitalize on the benefits of integration after a project is designed and installed. At that point, it can be too difficult, time consuming and costly to re-engineer the systems. So setting integration as a goal during the initial stages of a project is critical for optimized facility design.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: What resources are available for end-users on your Web site — www.honeywell.com/buildingsolutions?

Mike Taylor: There are a variety of materials, including brochures, case studies, customer testimonials and the like. We also have a selection tool to help users find Honeywell systems, products and application data for their buildings in a matter of seconds. And there is a quarterly newsletter for people who want to keep up on the latest facilities insight and news.

SecuritySolutionsWatch.com: Thanks again for joining us today, Mike. Are there any other subjects you’d like to discuss?

Mike Taylor: Back to Instant Alert, we’ve received a lot of inquiries from parents who have been introduced to the service through their child’s school and want to use it at work — for employee communications, pandemic planning, etc. However, office buildings and hospitals, for example, have a different set of communication requirements than a school district.

So we just launched a new version of the service, called Instant Alert Plus, that’s designed specifically for municipalities, colleges and universities, and healthcare and industrial facilities. We’ve seen a lot of interest out of the chute and have started working with several organizations, including Contra Costa County in the Bay Area.