Well, for starters, I’m not aware of any system UL listed for commercial fire alarm and everything (or anything) else you mentioned. There’s plenty of burg panels listed for residential fire alarm, not so much for commercial. You’ll find a lot of the residential ones in small businesses, but those businesses aren’t technically required to have a fire alarm system so it doesn’t get looked at.
Secondly, you have to add equipment to control doors, hvac’s, etc. anyways, so having one panel do it all and having to UL list everything connected to that panel becomes cost prohibitive quickly. Not to mention making changes, going through relisting, etc. at the rate security moves just seems like a nightmare. I can’t think of a situation where I ever thought it would be nice to hook a card reader up to my FACP instead of my access control panel. On the other side I can’t ever think of a situation where I wanted to hook up a smoke detector to an access control system instead of the FACP. There are plenty of times when I wanted the building controls system to control the dampers though! We always end up doing it though, sometimes in parallel with the controls system, or sometimes we give them outputs telling them what we’re doing.
Third, anything connected to the system would require 24 hours/5 minutes battery backup. This becomes prohibitively expensive when you’re looking at large access control and building controls systems. It just makes more sense to have separate systems do all of these things.
And lastly, as for a common familiar interface, integration does exist. You can get a computer that at the very least monitors (but not always controls, again, you get into UL issues but it is possible) fire alarm systems. The same computer can also be hooked up to building controls, access control, cctv, etc. and be programmed to do things like tell the CCTV system to record a camera pointed at a pull station that was just pulled. The reality is, these situations are very few and far in between, but you can at least get a common interface. If the operator see’s a smoke alarm, they can pull up cameras in the area. If the operator see’s an air handler shut down, they can see there’s also a duct detector in alarm and know what’s going on. So to that extent, plenty of integration already exists but it’s a computer taking in information from different dedicated systems and putting it all into a common platform. turn off that PC and the dedicated fire alarm system should operate like nothing is wrong. the access control system should also operate like nothing is wrong. you may lose your cctv system, and even the controls system may go down depending on how it’s set up.
The advantage with dedicated systems is for security problems, you send out a security tech. For fire, a fire tech… you don’t want to pay the fee’s of a technician who is an expert at everything. The phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” comes to mind… there’s plenty of guys who do both fire and security, very few do hvac controls too. It’s just an entirely different world.