Door Objects for Access Control

Economic Perspective

Security is big business today. However, the  industry has some inherent economic challenges. Any medium sized commercial software company will sell thousands of one program, and a large software company will sell millions of copies. Yet, even the largest access control companies sell only hundreds, or fewer, of any one large system software product. Large systems can be considered to be those with greater than 256 readers. These programs are complex and require many lines of code, perhaps as many as 500,000 lines.

Programmers can only produce so many lines of code per year, yet each line of code costs the same to both the large software company and access control company. Microsoft has said that NT is over 20 million lines of code.  Therefore, the return on investment per line of code is hundreds to thousands of times greater for the commercial software company than for the access control company. The difference is made up by all of the hardware sales in the security world. The fact remains that changing the software to fix a slight anomaly in a timer for a door cannot easily be justified on a "return on investment" basis. Money is lost on every change, and changes are made only because of the long term goal of having a good system and good customer relations.

The biggest single cost when changing SRB microcode is the engineering and testing to make sure that the change will not adversly affect the installed base of doors.  I call this the legacy code cost.   The door objects concept eliminates this cost because a newly created door object would only affect the doors to which it is applied.

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