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An integrator’s view

The marketing teams of surveillance manufacturers and vendors do a great job of telling people about their company’s products and what they can do. The problem is that they are the marketing team, they will give the best overview and capabilities they can come up with.

Similarly, end users often don’t want to talk about the products they use as some see it as giving away too much information about their security system, while others don’t want to admit they sold their bosses a story and spent a fortune on something that doesn’t quite deliver. We experienced this at Securex when someone offloaded about how a certain brand was touting their AI as the best there is, but it didn’t deliver when installed in the user’s real-world environment.

SMART Surveillance decided to ask a systems integrator (SI), the person usually caught in the middle and who gets blamed by the users and the vendors alike when something goes wrong, what their experience is like in the surveillance market right now. We obviously didn’t ask for any horror stories (they wouldn’t have told us any, not on the record anyway), but for their experience in how the industry has changed and how the user environment is dealing with the new technologies and options offered to them.

Our questions went to Rivash Raghubir from RR Electronic Security Solutions.

Starting out, we focus on the cameras available today; there are many high-end cameras capable of functionality a server would struggled to perform 20 years ago, but what, in general, are customers after? (Do they want cameras with all the bells and whistles or are they still relying on servers to handle the heavy processing?

Raghubir says it is still pretty much a 50/50 split in terms of what end users want. “The older generation don’t really want to trust edge-type solutions and rely heavily on servers and the processing power of multiple cores etc. for AI-type applications, but the younger generation seem to be very comfortable using analytics on the edge.”

Another concept that has been widely promoted is that of opex vs capex; paying a monthly fee for a service including hardware, software and maintenance, as opposed to the big budget spend every few years. This is closely linked to the rise of cloud services both in the security and ICT industries. However, Raghubir firmly states that monthly fees are not popular among RR’s clients. “Almost all of our clients prefer to budget and spend once-off projects costs.”

Brand loyalty

Like cars, surveillance brands used to have their loyalists who would stay with one brand under almost any circumstances. These days, however, the hardware at the high and mid-levels is pretty similar, and the software differentiators depend on who you are talking to. So, what do the end users look at when making buying decisions?

Raghubir notes that with the bigger corporates, RR’s clients prefer to stick to a single brand, mainly for cybersecurity reasons. This allows the client to create rules and processes according to their internal requirements; it is much simpler to manage a single brand instead of multiple brands with different security offerings. “With smaller clients, in terms of 30 - 50 cameras, they are not really brand specific and any brand that does the job will be considered.”

On the issue of cloud services, Raghubir says the company has not felt any impact in its CCTV and access control business. “There was quite a lot of hype about 12-18 months ago where clients were very interested in cloud, but as this hype unfolded there were many questions around costing due to monthly and data charges etc. Additionally, the main factor influencing the decline in interest is cybersecurity, in terms of the protection offered from the hosting side to the client’s infrastructure.”

Integration issues

No matter which brands one chooses, the question of integration is still key – even after all these years of talking about its importance and the vendors all claiming openness and their integration capabilities. In the surveillance market, ONVIF is the basic standard for integration, but there are always other needs, and other equipment users want to manage centrally and share data where necessary. Is integration still a challenge or have vendors accepted that openness is a necessity?

Integration is still a challenge, according to Raghubir, although he says that most are adhering to ONVIF standards. However, the limitation of what an API can be integrated with still holds true. If the vendors include an SDK for integration work, optimal performance would be achievable. There are still issues and Sis, like RR, understand that with an SDK, vendors will be opening the product’s IP and some are not keen on that idea.

As an SI, integration is naturally key for RR. “Our latest offering is an application called Omnitrac, which is an application we created from scratch over a period of four years with a focus on a single platform that can simultaneously communicate with multiple hardware devices, such as different types of controllers, and even directly to multiple biometric and facial devices without the use of a controller. We are officially taking this product to market from June 2023.” (More information is available at https://omnitrac.co.za/.)

For more information, contact RR Electronic Security Solutions, +27 11 794 2825, [email protected], www.rress.co.za

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