HSRC’s new Global People Screening Markets and Technologies Outlook 2009-2015 provides a coherent analysis of the challenges and opportunities facing this industry, from technological and functional perspectives.
People screening has never been more interesting and challenging. The industry is currently in a transition – from aging, low performance and low cost-effectiveness products, to a new generation of more promising solutions. But even the new line of products is not the “promised land”. Not yet.
Security officials, budgeters, policy makers and users are all facing a particularly complex mix of economic and technological challenges that are guaranteed to make the people screening market an “interesting” arena of both technological and commercial activities. On the one hand, the economic crisis signals restraint and patience in acquisition, deployment, replacement and improvement; on the other hand, the realities in the field tell us of an urgent need to upgrade existing solutions and start bringing in some of the new products. And to make things even more complicated, decision makers are internalizing the fact that even the new line of people screening products is only an interim solution, and that a “true” solution requires a totally different level of integration and processing.
On a more detailed level, what we see in the people screening market is the emergence of a new line of products that are based on technologies hitherto not generic to this field, such as mm wave, backscatter x-ray, terahertz, microwave. Most of these technologies are designed to increase the threat detection spectrum from weapons and “single threats” to “multi” or “all-threats”, including explosives of different flavors, and even threats of mass disruption/destruction.
The addition of standoff capabilities opens additional new horizons in people screening. They signal the future, but they don’t – yet - bring us there.
It is important to realize that even though both the new technologies, and the new capabilities signal a healthy progress in this sector, another generation will pass until “real” cost-effective, people screening solutions enter the market. These products will be based on a fusion of multiple technologies, on the ability to detect multiple threats simultaneously, and most important, on the ability to perform the screening on people not as a dedicated function, but while people are engaged in other activities, such as standing in line for passport control, waiting at the ticket counter or walking from one area of a facility to another. Several vendors already understand that this is what the market needs, but we all have to realize that it will be years before such solutions become a reality. So, in this period of transition and economic stress, planners will have to think long and hard about how to maximize their shrinking budgets, while maximizing the screening functions available to them. Indeed, a formidable challenge.
Source: Homeland Security Market Research
