Internal monitoring of digital video systems also contributes to other cost savings and business efficiency. Verifying alarm situations with video, for example, can help Waste Management avoid having to pay fire and police penalty charges for false alarms.

The convergence efforts helped the two groups link in-house video with an automated scale transaction system that functions like a point-of-sale (POS) system for the trash-hauling business, says Rogers. Dump trucks are weighed at landfills and transfer stations and are charged based on the weight of their loads. These transactions feed into Waste Management's revenue and billing systems. The in-house video system records images of the trucks so that the firm can track license plate numbers, identify the types of vehicle and view each truck's contents.

"When we integrate the transaction data with the digital images of the truck, we have both the visual image and the transaction information stored together," says Rogers. That helps reduce data storage costs, and network access to the digital video systems also reduces the time and cost required for camera audits of its scale transactions.

In the retail industry, security convergence is most prominent in the area of loss prevention, where some merchants are using electronic article surveillance tags (which trigger an alarm if not inactivated by the cashier), and may eventually progress to RFID tags, says Steve Stone, CIO at Lowe's Companies Inc. in Mooresville, N.C.

Stone gives this example of how information and physical security can complement each other: The IT group at Lowe's produces a set of reports that evaluate point-of-sale trends. If managers identify a pattern of suspected malfeasance at any of the registers, they can use in-store cameras to see if there's anything that corroborates the POS data, which is time-stamped.