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Southern Cape capital secured

As the sixth oldest town in South Africa and with 180 000 residents, George forms the administrative capital of the southern Cape in the world-renowned Garden Route area. While George is the business capital of the region, it also boasts the largest medical fraternity and has the largest number of bednights’ accommodation available.

With its own airport, large conference facilities, many tourist attractions which includes numerous championship golf courses, George is a travel destination for many South Africans and also tourists from all over the world.

The George Municipality wanted a CCTV system to protect the building that includes the mayor’s office, the offices of all the political parties councillors, a place where meetings about decisions on local government are held, all the city management and services departments and payments for local rates and taxes are also received at this location.

After months of tender processes, Suiderkruis Security was awarded the contract to install a new CCTV system for George Municipality. The biggest challenge was the size of the building that included multiple floors which could result in vast amounts of cabling used and would increase the project value and time spent tremendously.

Another important issue was also system functionality and ease of use. The controllers monitoring these cameras are normally not very IT literate and the system should work for them and not the other way around.

“I therefore decided that the system design should as far as possible utilise IP cameras and at selected places and entrances use megapixel cameras. To save even further cabling and time costs all cameras were to be powered by POE switches,” says Andre Steenkamp from Suiderkruis Security.

“After seeing the 3xLOGIC systems in the Securex 2009 exhibition I contacted Michael Isakov from 3xLOGIC looking for the following features: ease of installation, very easy graphical user interface and the Aztech compression rate. One of the most important factors in my decision to close the deal and order the equipment was the professional encounter I had with all personnel associated with the product and the response times on my questions. It gave me the confidence that the back-up I will receive from the 3xLOGIC team will also be of the highest standard,” continues Steenkamp.

States Michael Isakov of 3xLOGIC: “Our system was specifically designed to address the deployment and operational challenges we face in safe-city projects assuring we meet the main goal – keeping the city centre safe, protecting the public buildings, streets and public parks, and more importantly, preventing potential crime and violations. There is a high growing demand for safe-city projects and we are here to address the need.”

A municipality representative stated that this is the beginning of a much larger project as the municipality plans to expand the system as and when money becomes available in its budget.

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