Detection Is Not Response

A big part of my career has been about helping this industry get better at noticing things.

Back in 2008 I took over R&D at March Networks. We had an international team building cameras, encoders, DVRs and the software behind them, for fixed sites and for things that move: trains, planes and automobiles. Every single day the job had the same focus: make video sharper, more reliable, easier to search, smarter about what it’s looking at.

And frankly … the industry delivered. Look at where we are now. Cameras classify people, vehicles and animals. Analytics flag loitering or a weapon. Access systems know when a door is held three seconds too long. Sensors pick up vape, heat, water and gunshots. We built an extraordinary nervous system for our buildings and outdoor spaces.

Then my path took me through real-time communications, no-code platforms and IoT, and eventually I arrived at Teldio. Here the job is the other half of the story: connecting all that sensing to the people who actually respond, including the two-way radio on their belt. That’s where I learned the uncomfortable truth.

Let me tell you about Honolulu, Hawaii.

The airport has more than 130 AED cabinets spread across the property. Those defibrillators save lives. The State of Hawaii says its airport AED program has survival rates more than eight times those of the local community. But here’s how the airport used to find out one of them had been pulled off the wall: somebody saw an ambulance arriving with its lights on.

Think about that for a second. Someone’s heart has stopped. A bystander has grabbed the most important device in the building. And the first signal airport operations gets is flashing lights in the airport drop-off lane.

So we fixed it. Together with AED Institute and JHL Integrations, we connected every cabinet to the airport’s operations, security teams and the team that maintains the AEDs. Now, the moment a cabinet opens or an AED comes out, an alert lands in the airport’s own applications and systems, so the right people know, and quickly. They can help the situation while it still matters. The AED maintenance company sees the same data, so every unit stays charged and ready for the next emergency. Martinez Jacobs, then chief of the airport’s Aircraft Rescue and Fire Fighting division, put it best when the Hawaii Department of Transportation announced the system: “with cardiac situations every second counts.”

That’s what Teldio does. We take the moment something happens and make sure it reaches the people who can act on it, connecting things that usually do not.

The speed of a phone tree

Honolulu isn’t unusual. Even at very well-run sites, the door is forced at 2:14 a.m. The access system knows. The camera saw it. The analytics even tagged it. And then the human at the desk starts doing the integration by hand. Find the camera. Check the log. Work out who’s on shift. Key the radio. Write it up later, from memory.

We spent twenty years making detection faster than the human eye. Then we handed the result to a process that runs at the speed of a phone tree.

I’m not the only one who sees it. In Gallagher’s new 2027 Security Industry Trends Report, Mariah Rimbert describes operators still stitching video, access records and related events together by hand across several screens. Her alternative is an alarm that arrives already enriched with all of it. That’s the right picture. I’d take it one step further: the alarm shouldn’t only arrive with context. It should arrive with action already under way. End users agree. In Genetec’s 2026 survey of more than 7,000 professionals, the top thing organisations want from AI is to automatically trigger events.

You’ll recognise it everywhere

In a hospital, a Code White hits one of 180 panic buttons. Security knows “aggression, Building C.” What they need is the room, and which officer is closest. Too often, someone works that out over the radio while the clock runs.

In a school district, one summer brought roughly 1,800 burglar alarms. 1,799 of them were false. Every one meant a call, a drive, a guard at a door in the middle of the night. The district didn’t need more detection. It needed a way to look at the three closest cameras before anyone rolled.

In a data center, a cooling alarm sits on a dashboard nobody watches at 3 a.m. Detected perfectly. Ignored perfectly, for forty minutes.

Different industries, same pattern. A brilliant system notices … and then the response depends on someone remembering the procedure.

What it looks like when the gap closes

This is the part I genuinely love, because it isn’t theory. It’s what our partners build with Teldio Fabric every month, for customers around the world.

Picture a hospital where a staff duress button is pressed in the emergency department, and one workflow runs with no operator action needed:

1. The nearest cameras pin to the security desk and to the responder’s phone.
2. Doors on the response route unlock, and the ward entrance locks down.
3. A zone announcement plays over the IP speakers.
4. The charge nurse and the security supervisor are notified on whatever they’re carrying, including their MOTOTRBO radios.
5. The nearest AED’s cabinet status and location go to the responders.
6. An incident ticket opens with the clip, the door events and the timestamps already attached.
7. Every step is written to an auditable log for the review afterwards.

That’s what Teldio Fabric is for. Our job at Teldio is to make the Motorola Solutions and Avigilon stack win, and to make it behave, together with every other vendor in the building, like one ecosystem instead of five. Teldio Fabric sits between the systems you already own (Avigilon Unity and Alta video and access control, fire panels, intercoms, sensors, PLCs, radios, phones, email and SMS, your ticketing and work-order systems) and turns their events into coordinated action. It ingests every event, normalizes it into one language, applies the logic of your procedures, and routes the right action to the right system or the right person. It works in both directions: a radio acknowledgement can close an alarm, and an event from anywhere can pop the camera in Avigilon.

And it’s not a custom project held together with scripts that break at the next firmware update. Teldio Fabric has 230+ integrations today, regardless of make, model or version, with new ones shipping every month. Connecting your next system is configuration, not code. (I spent years building no-code platforms, so trust me, I’m very fond of that sentence.)

The school district’s alarm now arrives with its three closest cameras. The data-center alarm becomes a voice page, a camera pop and a work ticket, and if nobody acknowledges it, it escalates.

Nobody ripped anything out. They just made what they already owned work together.

The next twenty years

Our industry has done remarkable work on the first half of the problem. I’m proud to have played a small part in it.

The next twenty years belong to the second half, the moment after the alert. The winners won’t be the organisations with the most cameras or the cleverest analytics. They’ll be the ones where a detection, anywhere in the building, becomes a response automatically, in seconds, on the device that’s already in the right person’s hand, with the record written before anyone sits down to write it.

Waiting for that world feels safe. It isn’t. It’s available right now, on the systems you’ve already installed.

So here’s my question for you: in your building, what happens in the sixty seconds after an alarm?

If the honest answer involves a phone call and somebody’s memory, let’s change that together. Ask your Avigilon partner about Teldio Fabric. If you’re one of the thousands of Avigilon and partner folks already on kb.teldio.com, go and explore what’s possible. I think you’ll be surprised how much of your building is ready to work as one.

Where can we help you next?

This is the first post in “The Common Thread”, an occasional series on where physical security is heading and what I’ve learned along the way. More soon.