Ahead of the SJUK Leaders in Security Conference 2026, Jos Beernink, Vice President Europe, Physical Access Control at HID, explains why partnership is the security industry’s next competitive advantage.
The security industry has spent decades building walls around data to keep it safe, around infrastructure to keep it resilient and walls between IT and physical security teams, each protecting its own domain with the best of intentions.
The result has been layers of protection that were each sensible in isolation, but which, over time, quietly extended to the relationships among vendors, integrators and technology partners who are, ultimately, on the same side.
Thankfully, that model is under pressure. The threats facing organisations across the UK and Europe today do not respect organisational boundaries and neither should the solutions designed to counter them.
As I step into my role leading HID’s Physical Access Control business across Europe, what I see clearly is that the companies best positioned to lead in this market are not those with the longest product catalogue, but those who have built the most capable, trusted and interoperable ecosystem around them.
It is a shift that goes to the heart of why HID is proud to serve as Lead Partner for the 2026 SJUK Leaders in Security Conference, an event that prioritises exactly the kind of peer exchange, collaboration and honest conversation that this industry needs more of.
For most of the security industry’s history, the relationship between manufacturer, integrator and end user was transactional.
Products moved through a distribution chain and value was measured in units shipped.
The integrator installed, the customer operated and the manufacturer waited for the next upgrade cycle.
That model is being displaced by something more demanding and more rewarding.
According to the Security Industry Association’s 2026 Security Megatrends report, the industry is shifting from the traditional channel model to a “value chain”, a framework that centres not solely on product delivery, but on customer outcomes.
In this model, manufacturers, integrators and technology partners co-create solutions around shared customer problems.
The question changes from “how do we move product?” to “how do we solve this customer’s challenge together?”
At HID, we have been operating with this philosophy for some time.
With over 2,300 partners enrolled in our global Advantage Partner Programme – spanning more than 140 countries – and more than 200 technology partners integrated into our platforms, we have learned that the channel is not a sales mechanism.
It is a strategic engine for innovation and trust. The distinction matters in practice.
It means investing in partner education, not just partner discounts.
It means working closely with integrators so that they can plan with confidence and not react to surprises.
And it means building open platforms that allow technology partners to design, test and bring to market integrations that make the overall solution smarter, without requiring them to start from scratch.
One of the most important conversations happening in the UK security market right now is about openness.
End users from corporate real estate directors to heads of critical infrastructure security are increasingly unwilling to accept proprietary lock-in.
They have watched the IT industry converge on open standards, cloud-native platforms and API-first architectures and they expect physical security to follow.
This is not a threat to established vendors. It is rather, an opportunity.
HID’s approach to this is structural. Our Origo platform, for instance, was built as a purpose-designed environment for technology partners working in the mobile access space.
Rather than simply licensing a credential format, Origo gives organisations the tools to design, build and validate integrations through documented APIs and SDKs and to achieve a globally recognised accreditation for doing so.
Partners may gain early access to HID’s technology roadmap, dedicated technical support and joint go-to-market opportunities.
In return, customers gain a broader, deeper and more capable solution ecosystem than any single vendor could build alone.
The results of this approach are becoming visible in the market and they span geographies.
At British Land’s Broadgate campus at 100 Liverpool Street in London, employees now access the building using their badge in Apple Wallet, a deployment that reflects where commercial real estate expectations are heading in one of Europe’s most competitive office markets.
In Norway, at Aker Security, a partnership combining HID’s access technology with a smart workspace platform has reduced the time and effort of mobile credential onboarding to a single self-service flow; and at Buró Property in Latin America, a deployment combining HID Mobile Access with digital wallet technology brought Apple Wallet and Google Wallet-based credentials to corporate office buildings, unifying access to turnstiles, elevators and parking for thousands of tenants, each using whichever device they already carry.
In these three different markets with three different building types, there was one consistent outcome: Security infrastructure designed to work the way people already expect technology to work.
The UK security landscape in 2026 presents a specific set of pressures that make this ecosystem thinking especially relevant. Legacy infrastructure is a persistent challenge.
A substantial share of access control deployments across the country still relies on technology designed for a threat environment that no longer exists: Credentials that can be cloned, systems that cannot communicate with modern IT infrastructure and architectures that create blind spots in what should be a unified security posture.
At the same time, the regulatory environment is becoming stricter.
The Network and Information Security (NIS2) Directive, which came into force across the European Union and which the UK continues to reference as a baseline for critical infrastructure security standards, is raising the bar for how organisations must protect, monitor and respond to threats across their digital and physical environments.
Physical access control needs to be part of an integrated risk management framework.
For organisations navigating this complexity, the instinct is often to look for a single vendor who can solve everything.
That instinct is understandable but rarely delivers the best outcome.
The more productive question is: “Which vendor has built the ecosystem – the partnerships, the integrations the open interfaces – that will allow us to assemble the right solution for our specific environment, without trapping us into a single supplier’s roadmap?”
Technology architecture alone does not build an ecosystem.
Trust does, and trust is built through human relationships, sustained over time, through the kind of honest, peer-to-peer exchange that formal procurement processes rarely allow.
In my 25-year career, what I have learned consistently is that the vendors who earn long-term trust are the ones who understand that their success is inseparable from the success of their partners, their customers and the wider industry they serve.
This is why physical presence in the market matters as much as any product specification.
Attending the right conversations, being willing to listen as much as speak, showing up consistently in the forums where security professionals work through the problems that keep them awake at night are not soft commitments. They are how trust is built.
The SJUK Leaders in Security Conference represents exactly this kind of forum.
Thinking of this strategic exchange, HID will be there to listen, exchange and be part of the broader conversation that moves the security industry forward.
The security industry is at an inflection point.
HID’s 2026 State of Security and Identity Report, which surveyed more than 1,500 end users and industry partners, found that 52% of organisations cite managing fragmented identity systems as their primary challenge and physical-digital convergence is no longer a strategic ambition, but an operational necessity.
AI is already reshaping how security systems learn, adapt and respond.
Smart building platforms are converging physical access, environmental management and occupancy data into unified operational views.
Identity is becoming the common thread connecting physical and digital security domains and the organisations that manage this converged identity well will have a structural advantage in managing risk.
None of these developments will be delivered by any single company working alone.
They will emerge from the collective capability of vendors, technology partners, integrators and end users who have invested in genuine collaboration, built on open standards and mutual trust.
HID’s ambition in the UK and across Europe is straightforward: To be the partner that organisations turn to because we offer genuine choice, consistent protection and the kind of trust that is earned over time, not because we have locked them in.
We look forward to those conversations at SJUK Leaders in Security 2026 and beyond.
This article was originally published in the April edition of Security Journal UK. To read your FREE digital edition, click here.
