Octopus
More Than Just Managing Visitors

“What makes Octopus special in the market of visitor management compared to any other solution today, is that our visitor management system is part of a larger holistic platform to secure an organization both within and without growth on physical and cybersecurity,” says Danny Nachmully, VP of International Sales in Octopus. In his interview with CIO Applications, Danny tells us how Octopus’ visitor management system is unique from its contemporaries and how it goes above and beyond to serve its clients’ visitor management and security needs.

1. What are the challenges that your clients face from frequent visitors? How can Octopus help them effectively mitigate these challenges?

Visitor management in a work process, provides the ability to effectively control, process, register, and validate people coming into an organization with due diligence. You need to have a process that somehow, doesn’t give a feeling that people are being restricted, and on the other hand, offers the ability to monitor people coming into the premises. So, the challenge here is to balance it effectively. Also, large organizations deal with a lot of people coming in, so you need to do a level of risk monitoring, mitigation and protection without harming business operations. So that’s another challenge.

Octopus fits under the criteria of a high-end system fit for a large multi-sited organization, in a high-risk environment. Our system can be deployed in a cloud-hosted solution and meets all kinds of work requirements. It can run on a tablet, computer, laptop, or a mobile device. You can register, validate, and invite visitors from any platform it can run on-cloud and on-premise. For companies with multiple sites, our system aggregates all their data under one data pool and allows to apply it in a multi-tenancy architecture as a de-centralized deployment. We integrate with third-party systems like facial recognition, biometric systems and license plate recognition (LPR) to make a fluid and flexible integrated system according to what the organization may need.

The app captures not only their entry and exit but also their benching time, which it sends to the internal Coca Cola HR systems to calculate their salaries.

Another added value provided to Coca-Cola is that supplier trucks are registered when they come in and their logistical information is captured. The data is used to calculate how many times a truck visited a site and route time between distribution sites, thereby calculating its efficiency. So that is the Coca-Cola case study where the visitor management system captures temporary employee time-stamps and calculates their salary and efficiency of vendor trucks. This is pretty cool for Coca-Cola’s operations and also saves them a lot of money every month.

"Our visitor management system is part of a larger holistic platform to secure an organization both within and without growth on physical and cybersecurity"

4. What does the future look like for Octopus? How is it planning to go beyond its current boundaries?

We are taking our visitor management system and expanding the platform to support even more crucial integrations with elements dealing with insider threats, cyber protection, and monitoring of physical assets, etc. We are trying to promote these solutions in the market and bring out the scope and value that the system can bring to customers. We wish to create awareness of the importance of a comprehensive, holistic visitor management system that is integrated with merging physical and cyber assets in one platform. A big, international company that has hundreds of buildings and holds SOCs of big-name companies understands very well that protecting their intellectual property is crucial to safeguard customer trust. Visitor management today is more understood in the market as one of the aspects of cyber and information protection. We want to ensure our customer’s that we monitor not only visitors but also your physical, cyber, and intellectual property aspects. We bring a one-stop-shop for visitor management and information security. That’s what we are trying to further push this more holistic visitor management platform and make the market better aware and understand its benefits.