Survey on Video Management Systems

Would you guys take 5 minutes of your time and do this survey please! 

Much Appreciated! 

Thanks!

Video Management Systems Survey

Smart Cities & City Surveillance

These days I meet people and generally talk about perceptions and requirements. Invariably the talk veers towards “Smart City Programmes”…. Mostly I guess the Term “City Surveillance” is losing its sheen.

Sales Guys!!!!!! The Lengths they will go to try and bring something new on the table even when they don’t have a clue as to what they mean!

City Surveillance began as a Pilot project at a few intersections at Jaipur in 2002 -2003 under the guise of Traffic Management. This Pilot project was carried out of India’s premier R&D centre C-DAC Trivandrum under the leadership of Shri. V. Muralidharan, Director, C-DACP & Shri. P. Ravikumar, Deputy Director, CIG, C-DAC. Later this was repeated at Pune. A paper on this can be found at

http://www.webelmediatronics.in/ATCS/CDAC%20writeup%20of%20Pune%20survey.pdf

I was associated with both these projects and in a way can take some amount of credit for being the first to start implementing surveillance which could have a positive impact on our daily life and make travel and commute safer and better. I am proud of this achievement.

However I am not here to TOMTOM my achievements but the thought which comes to me is

Are we Indian’s doing the right thing by trying to do stuff which is neither here or there and which in the long will not benefit any of us?

What am I talking about?

Let’s face it…. We are happily going about selling City Surveillance and Smart City Projects across the country.

I am also aware of a number of Large Multi National Organisations who are happily meeting various Governments with offers of financing schemes as long as their systems are installed. Come on you Sales Guys this is your country! The Country deserves systems and processes which we can provide to fulfill our objectives without compromising on quality of surveillance! Sadly our Truly Fantastic Sales Guys are happy doing their numbers, grabbing their sales incentives / bonuses and forget that they sell stuff that their country doesnot deserve.

A truly smart city approach would be integration of all possible video feeds from all public surveillance feeds to be really effective since this would actually enable transfer of data between agencies. After all the Law Enforcement Agency is the one which comes into operation the moment an incident takes place.

I don’t want to sound like the proverbial guy with the Pin to prick the bubble but the truth is that this is not possible in today’s scenario and there is no thought process that the road to be taken needs to have a destination of commonality!

Now this is interesting..Spare some of your time and think…

What if we have a common platform across cities which would be truly SMART!

We can achieve

• A Common Database of Criminals which can be shared and updated online on the go across cities

• Video Feeds could be accessed across cities from any location across the country

• A nationalized database which the centre can access and step in for priority requirements

Face Recognition options for the Law Enforcement Agencies for online recognition and updation of Database right from the streets to Police Stations to Check Post at borders to Jails and Various Public Locations across the Country!

Will we ever get to being SMART from a Technology point of View?

We are as a race extremely SMART!

By the way I was speaking about CCTV! ☺☺☺☺

Access Control

Most Corporates install systems which are based on global standards and policies, however what’s interesting is that Global Pricing standards are followed in India as well for systems and features which are not relevant or used in India.

Today modern access control systems have advanced greatly to lower cost of per door installations plus adding features like integrated photo badging, integration to digital video / CCTV, telephone entry systems and many more features that provide for scaling of access to corporate assets.

While my knowledge on Access Control is limited, I have found that over 60% of the installations in India specifically corporate installations use only a small percentage of the features available in the systems. I haven’t found any of the Security Managers complaining about the lack of feature utilization but the thought has always played in my mind that if a feature to price evaluation was done would the same Security Managers and Commercial Bean bags start looking at installations in a new manner.

Some Security Managers may not even know a feature is available in the system and the fault lies with the installer and OEM for not educating the end user. This is not because they don’t want to educate the end client but most of the time due to lack of information that the local teams have about the systems themselves.

Our Security Managers are some of the best in the world and would probably find a relevant method to use a particular feature of the system to suit Indian conditions and most of them know what will be used and what will not be used in India.

Access control systems which are sold to Corporate Clients use Enterprise class licensing and the OEM rides on this to sell at a price level negotiated for Global Clients in India… So we end up paying for what is never going to be used.. What if the Security Manager had a say and indicated feature to price benefit exercise? It would shake up this market and get prices downwards.. Prices would be re-negotiated on a region to region basis and we would still end up with some of the best technologies at a lower cost.

I may not be 100% correct on this assumption but hey the pressure would be on the OEM to justify the kind of price and service provided in India.

I am actually quite keen on seeing what the experts in this field have to say about this thought process and would anyone actually go about this exercise to downscale feature availability based on installations?