Challenge

The University of Houston, the leading public research university in Houston and the third largest university in Texas, has grown to service the city of Houston and beyond through their extensive educational offerings, partnerships, and contributions to the community. A recent market analysis supported a demand for UH programs in the Sugar Land and Katy communities, and the UH System responded with constructing one new building on each campus.

Solution

American Direct and AccessNsite were chosen to provide access control for the Sugar Land campus and American Direct and AccessNsite’s partner, Skyhawk, were chosen for the Katy campus. American Direct was able to provide significant savings to UH because, instead of considering product mix for two different buildings individually, they were able to use similar product mix on both buildings and reduce the amount of coordination time to manage both projects. The mix included hard wired, card-based, Mercury panels and IN-120 and IN-220 battery-powered WiFi locks. Sugar Land also uses AIPHONE IXSeries (VoIP, Voice over Internet Protocol intercoms) at the entrances to the building and on each floor near the elevators. 

Integrating with existing systems, like AIPHONE, is possible because of AccessNsite’s multi-layer security integration. This flexibility component is a significant contribution to the complete access control solution. Providing Division 8 and 28 products and services for the same client on one job is extremely efficient as it eliminates the scope gap and the possibility of trying to identify the area of responsibility, should an issue occur.

Finding a balance between securing buildings and keeping a friendly campus feel is not easy, but the right openings solutions can help. Advanced access control technology, like AccessNsite, can give campus security teams more control over their environment.