3 Questions: IC Realtime Discusses the Evolution of Surveillance

CI spoke with Matt Sailor, CEO of IC Realtime, regarding changes in surveillance such as the transition to cloud-based storage, IP surveillance and new purchasing decision makers within customers’ organizations.

Tom LeBlanc

If you have a question about surveillance, there are few better resources than IC Realtime.

The Pompano Beach, Fla.-based manufacturer of surveillance cameras is as well known for its work on the back end of a surveillance system, including its DVR storage solutions.

As CEO Matt Sailor points out, the surveillance market has changed to the point where cloud-based storage often makes more sense than using a hard drive.

That’s not the only way surveillance has evolved, Sailor tells CI editor Tom LeBlanc.

How can an integrator determine the right storage solution for a customer when it comes to surveillance, whether it’s hard DVR or if it’s cloud storage?

You’re starting to see a much larger acceptance of cloud storage than you once did before. Nowadays when archives are being kept on the NVR, DVR server edge … we’ve noticed a trend that [in] a lot of robberies they take the equipment, and therefore rendering the video that you’ve captured virtually useless … When you think of it in that mindset from the pure security standpoint … a cloud solution is actually far more secure than that of an onsite solution …

A lot of people don’t want to pay a very high fee in addition to the equipment install to keep the data. That price has been driven down dramatically to where cloud storage is really, really affordable, almost in any aspect.

We always hear that IP surveillance enables end users an ability to capture data and metrics for their customers, but what are some real-world examples?

It’s not necessarily coming from being an IP camera; it’s coming from the analytics on the software end. That’s basically taking unintelligent video and taking it into an intelligent level that feeds you information. [In one customer example] their big driver was not security. It was information and traffic at different times of the day around different areas.

So what they were trying to determine was why does a product do better in certain spots of the store? So we people counted via analytics. And we picked hotspots to determine if that was the spot that was determining the traffic or [if it was] the product itself.

Has the purchasing decision maker within customers’ organizations changed to an IT professional, similar to the change that has happened in AV integration?

No question, no question about it. It used to be [an] office manager, the GM, the facility manager … As you move into where we are now, where everything is in the IoT [Internet of Things] world, and everything is running and leveraging the backbone of the organization … we’re talking much more to the IT and back house department … At the end of the day, these systems need to sleep on complex networks. Everybody is using a lot of information that’s shared on that data that wasn’t 10 years ago.

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