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Get your budgets ready. According to IMS Research, you’ll be spending some big bucks over the next four years. A new IMS report forecasts that the Americas market for security systems integration will top $30 billion in 2016, growing at an average rate of more than 7 percent from last year until then.

The IMS report, which focuses on the installation and maintenance of security systems, says the United States is expected to remain the largest market in the Americas through 2016, but the fastest growth will be seen in Latin America.

Paul Bremner, IMS market analyst and author of the report, said that many security technology providers are trying to stake a claim in Latin America, but the outlook is different in the United States. “I believe we’re seeing the start of consolidation,” he said.

The Americas security systems integration market remains highly competitive, with the largest five integrators accounting for less than 20 percent of the market, the report says. “Furthermore, competition is increasing with traditional IT integrators entering the security market and taking market share away from the established security systems integrators,” Bremner said.

Bremner continues, “The security systems integration competitive environment is really interesting because the range of companies in the market is huge. At one end there are the enterprise integrators, like Johnson Controls and Siemens. At the other end are five-man companies serving a product or geographic market niche.”

It’s not the students, faculty or staff that are giving security directors headaches at schools and hospitals, it’s the visitors, according to a recent survey from Campus Safety magazine.

Lack of a visitor management system was the most common physical-access control challenge cited, with 33 percent of survey-takers from K-12, higher education and hospitals saying that their visitor management systems are either somewhat or completely unacceptable. Reaching visitors during an emergency was most often mentioned as a top emergency notification challenge.

The report on the survey is jam-packed with insightful figures on the success of surveillance systems, two-way radios and more, but in light of last month’s spate of bomb threats on college campuses the findings about emergency notification systems stood out.

Here are the top five challenges respondents chose in regard to their systems:

Reaching visitors during an emergency (27 percent)
Database management and updates—cell number, name, etc. (19 percent)
Student enrollment in text message alert system (17 percent)
Determining when it is appropriate to issue an alert (16 percent)
Policies supporting emergency notification are unclear or not developed (14 percent)

Louisiana State University recently announced a planned upgrade of its emergency text messaging system after bomb threats there Sept. 17. About an hour after the threats, the message was sent. It took about 80 minutes for the campus-wide evacuation to occur, but LSU officials said some areas of campus weren’t cleared for almost two hours.

Benny Holland Jr., executive vice president of the International Longshoreman’s Association and a trustee on the Port of Galveston’s governing board, wants tougher restrictions on the use of escorts for truck drivers and others who arrive at docks without cards supplied through the Transportation Worker Identification Credential program, according to a report in the Galveston Daily News.

Maritime and transportation workers are coming on to the docks without background checks or reliable ID, Holland said. Anyone who does not have a biometric TWIC ID is turned away or must wait for an escort.

More than 1 million TWIC cards have been issued, but the Coast Guard, which administers the program along with the TSA, has missed a number of deadlines to come up for a rule for card readers. The Coast Guard said last month it expected the rule would be issued by the end of the year.

Holland told the newspaper that some private firms tout their escort services as a way to circumvent stringent FBI screening. Although the escort is required to have the proper credentials, the arrangement does nothing to keep people from entering a port, Holland said. “I can go up there without a TWIC card and pay someone to escort me on a facility and be a terrorist or undesirable,” he said. “That is defeating the purpose—walking up and being escorted on without any background check.”

Holland said he wants to meet with officials in Washington to discuss the issue.

I have a few calls out about this, so far unanswered. You’d hope these escorts screen those that they’re escorting, right? Wouldn’t they be responsible if something goes wrong? I, for one, would definitely like to know more about that. Will keep you posted as I learn more.

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear a Floridian’s attempt to challenge the TSA’s use of full-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs at airport security checkpoints.

Jonathan Corbett, who writes the blog “TSA Out of Our Pants” and produced the YouTube video “How to Get Anything Through TSA Nude Body Scanners," filed the suit in Florida federal court, which said it could only be filed with the federal appeals court in Washington D.C. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta upheld the dismissal and the Supreme Court decided yesterday not to reopen it, according to a report from the Associated Press.

Corbett, in his blog Monday, said he will continue to forge ahead with his challenge against the TSA in the hopes he may have another shot with the appeals court in Atlanta. Meanwhile, he recently filed a lawsuit against the New York Police Department over an incident in which he was stopped and frisked by police officers while visiting Crown Heights in Brooklyn.