This local security company is headed to the Super Bowl

An event like the Super Bowl (the 2017 edition of which takes place this Sunday) is a serious security challenge for the host city. Last year, around 1 million people visited the Super Bowl in Santa Clara, Calif. And a whole host of agencies, from transportation to venue security, were charged with collecting data (video surveillance, etc.) and keeping people safe.

Vidsys makes it easier for all these agencies to work together — and this weekend the local company will be helping Houston (the host of Super Bowl LI) with just that.

See, Tysons Corner-based Vidsys has developed a software platform they describe as “Converged Security Information Management.” The platform gathers information from all kinds of security systems (cameras, sensors, etc) and shows all that data in one centralized place. It’s a god view of everything happening in a given space in real time, if you will.

During the Super Bowl, the city of Houston will be using the Vidsys platform to easily share information with the various agencies involved in the event, like the police department, fire department and more. It’ll be an “interactive collaborative dashboard between the agencies,” as CEO James Chong put it, and will encourage closer collaboration between security stakeholders.

Another key component of Vidsys’ software is its capacity to automatically detect what Chong describes as “anomalies.” Because the software collects so much information it can be overwhelming — the automatic detection of areas where things are happening differently than they normally do helps direct human attention to those (potential problem) areas first.

The Super Bowl is far from Vidsys first time around the block. The company, founded in 2005, also provided security services for the Formula One Grand Prix in Abu Dhabi, the London Olympics and the Brazil World Cup. Beyond that, the company has clients that include the government (think smart cities), educational institutions like the University of Hawaii and healthcare organizations like the Hospital Corporation of America.