SPAC® NEWS
HORANET, new member of the SPAC® Alliance
“Since the majority of French players in this sector are in the SPAC Alliance, it seemed natural for us to become a member.”
François-Xavier DELTOMBE,
Research & Development Director, HORANET
HORANET acts at the heart of local authorities and town halls by offering software solutions to facilitate the management of public facilities and promote interactions between local authorities and citizens.
Presentation of your business / key figures / areas of development
François-Xavier Deltombe: Horanet provides local authorities with digital solutions, mainly in the areas of the Environment, Sports & Leisure and User Relationship Management (URM). The Vendée-based company in western France has 85 employees and 25 years’ experience in the field. We work with around 500 local authorities in France, half of which are cities, with 325 waste collection centers and 350 swimming pools.
For the past 6 years, we have invested in an open-source software suite for local authorities called Horanet GO which offers 360° management of all the functions it covers, from physical access control to online purchasing and booking portals. It is also designed to meet the requirements of territorial reform under the French NOTRe law, by offering the ability to manage multiple EPCIs (public inter-municipality cooperation establishments).
What challenges do you face in terms of security?
François-Xavier Deltombe: Horanet mainly operates in the world of local authorities, where security requirements can vary greatly. Security is often moderate when it comes to managing citizens’ rights of use (access to municipal swimming pools, skating rinks or waste collection centers), but the level of security must be high in certain cases (e.g. access control to a city’s administrative buildings), as corroborated by the arrival of the European NIS 2 directive, which applies to many cities and urban areas. As a result, we often have to educate and advise the same customer in different contexts, and offer a level of security tailored to the specific risk of each use.
As we aim to pool our basic access control activities, our main challenge is to implement a system that offers a wide range of solutions with varying levels of security, so that the constraints for our customers and users correspond to the risks involved.
Why did you join the SPAC® Alliance and its ecosystem (European sovereignty)?
François-Xavier Deltombe: Our expertise lies particularly in the field of contactless badge identification and physical access control. Since the majority of French players in this sector are in the SPAC® Alliance, it seemed natural for us to become a member.
Joining the SPAC® Alliance gives us the opportunity to take part in productive discussion, benefit from feedback, stay at the cutting edge of innovation and contribute to the advancement of physical access control protocols.
What benefits can the SSCP® protocol bring to the security market? And to you?
François-Xavier Deltombe: The interoperability offered by a standard protocol makes it easy to interface with a wide range of compatible equipment. This gives us and our customers the reassurance that our system can evolve more easily over time and therefore extends the life of the product.
SSCP® also offers a turnkey solution that significantly enhances the security of access control systems, compared with historical access control protocols that are still widely used. What’s more, equipment certification provides an additional guarantee that the protocol is properly implemented.
Finally, offering systems based on SSCP®, which is a state-of-the-art security protocol endorsed by the French Cybersecurity Agency (ANSSI), is a testament of quality for our customers, and can become a strong selling point.