3xLOGIC

Kris Nickeson, 3xLOGIC’s Technical Services Manager has written an excellent article detailing methods that will save installers time and money on every install.

The article is only available to our Authorized Partners and can be found in the private forums at: http://www.3xlogic.com/partnerforum/save-time-and-energy-installs.

Here’s a little excerpt from the article:

"So take a minute.  Set it up on your demo box at your shop.  Test that new IP camera on a simple setup, with a DVR, switch and camera.  Remove all the unknown variables from your testing equations by keeping it simple and doing one test at a time, in a controlled environment, with known-good parts and equipment.  Realizing you don’t have the proper dipswitch settings on your PTZ a day and a half after you returned the $500/day bucket truck is not how you want to end your install.  Some of those cameras installed on the roof that you can’t seem to get working on your network may have been setup in 3 minutes in your shop on a controlled network.  Now that they’re unreachable, some very valuable test are extremely time consuming.  Is it my cabling, or a bad camera?  That’s easy to test on a simple switch/DVR/camera setup with a known-good, prebuilt patch cable.  It’s much harder to determine the cause of failure once the camera is 300 feet away on a roof somewhere, in a housing, running through 3 network closets & 4 routers.  It happens, believe me."

If you are an Authorized Partner and do not have your 3xlogic.com username and password yet, call your salesperson and get setup today!

A recent break in at the 3xLOGIC Saanich, BC development lab demonstrates what many of us already knew, that video cameras alone don’t stop crime.

There was a time several years ago when the presence of security cameras alone were a strong deterrent to crime. At that time, the presence of security cameras were something of a rarity and criminals were unsure if someone was watching them.

Today, security cameras are everywhere and people generally assume that no one is watching. Even if they are being recorded, the second assumption is that the quailty of the video will be so poor that they run little risk of being identified.

It’s never fun to experience a break in, and not knowing exactly what happened can leave you feeling violated and vulnerable. Having high-quality video of the event however can leave you feeling more empowered and in control of the event.

The latest video security technology available today is megapixel IP video. As seen in the news clip, these systems provide quality far above the standard video systems in common use.

Several years ago it was predicted that IP cameras would quickly replace the poor quality analog cameras we see everyday on the news clips, but the truth is that only 12-20% (discussion here) of new camera sales are comprised of IP cameras with megapixel IP cameras being an even smaller percentage.

Some of the reasons for the slower than predicted penetration include:

• Slow support by the large manufacturers
• Very basic or poor implementation by large manufacturers
• Security sales people not understanding the technology or how to sell it
• Purchasers not being given enough concrete information about the value of moving to megapixel

Currently over 80% of the solutions being sold by 3xLOGIC will be deployed with at least one megapixel camera, and many with lots.

The reasons people turn to 3xLOGIC for megapixel are simple. It’s what we do and we do it well.

There are several new video formats that have hit the surveillance industry recently that will change the way we think about video.

There once was a time (like just a few years ago) when security video was roughly the equivalent of 1960’s television .. except security video didn’t even have sound and could only be recorded at low-frame rates.

These days high-definition security video is in full swing just like it’s television counterpart and actually goes a step further by offering a variety of new formats, affordable megapixel cameras, and recorders that can actually record it all and more. 

What does this all mean?

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know that as of February 17, 2009, commercial television stations in the United States will no longer be broadcasting low-definition analog NTSC television signals. Instead they will be sending out new high-definition digital signals with far superior quality and resolution. 

The changes taking place in the security world are very similar to commercial television with the exception that no one is forcing you to stop using your old standard resolution camera systems. Even so, with all the new high-definition (HDTV) formats available it might be time to start learning about these new technologies and considering if they make sense for your applications.

The New Formats

The format we’ve been using for all analog security cameras is based on the National Television System Committee (NTSC) standards which were originally defined in 1941! In 1953 they added color to the standard. The resolution however, has remained quite the same for the last 50 years, although most video surveillance recorders compress the images so much that the quality is actually much less than the old TV standard.

All that has changed very quickly in the last few years with the introduction of IP cameras that technically do not have to adhere to the NTSC standard. This has allowed manufacturers to build cameras using the megapixel technology developed for digital photography cameras.

In addition to megapixel, it has also allowed the introduction of new specialty formats including:

• 16:9 and other wide aspect ratios that cover more area horizontally. NTSC was fixed at 4:3 meaning 4 units wide by 3 units tall.
• 180 and 360-degree super megapixel panoramic that allows you to record an entire room from the wall (180-degree) or an entire room from the center (360-degree).
• 180-degree top-down fisheye which allow you to record an entire room from the ceiling.

Comparing Pixels

Below is an actual image (at about 7% of its original size) from an Arecont 180 degree panoramic camera with other common resolutions including commercial 1080i HDTV superimposed on it. 

Compared to the 180-degree panoramic image, or even the now relatively low-res 1.3 megapixel signified by the yellow square, it’s becoming harder to imagine being limited to standard or even high-res analog cameras only. Certainly, analog cameras will have applications for several years yet to come, but it’s easy to see why megapixel will quickly replace them.

The Challenges

As with any new technology, there are certain limitations and challenges that we should be aware of before we set out to design and install a system utilizing megapixel cameras.

If we understand the limitations and set our expectations accordingly, we can deploy highly successful megapixel systems today. If we are thinking we’d like to deploy a moderately priced system recording sixteen (16) super 180-degree megapixel cameras recording at 30 fps each we are going to be sadly disappointed. If however, we pick and choose the areas where megapixel makes sense and cover other areas with more traditional cameras, this can be successfully done today rather painlessly.

I certainly advise you work with the manufacturers of the technology to assist you in designing a system that will meet your expectations. The primary challenges associated with megapixel all have to do with the extreme size of the video files produced. Therefore, there will be limitations in the following areas. Some of these can be overcome, some are more challenging.

• Network limitations and congestion can severely limit the frame rate, possible even when using relatively few cameras on the same network.
• Moderately priced (and even some expensive) recorders will only be able to process a certain amount of video because of processor and bus limitations. Even if the manufacturer say’s it can handle up to 128 IP cameras, that number is going to become much much smaller when we talk about megapixel and frame rate.
• Large file sizes translate into large hard drive storage requirements. Even with today’s terabyte drives, you will find that most systems cannot hold enough drives to give you the storage you would need to record more than a handful or two of the megapixel cameras. Even with external storage, there is going to be a point where it’s just not going to fit into that McDonalds manager’s office.
• Even with 7-12 Mbps internet bandwidth offered by leading cable companies, these images are not going to stream effectively without transcoding, resizing or frame-dropping, which by the way also uses your CPU.

The point is that megapixel is here and usable but you must understand the limitations to be successful.

The New Recorders and Codec’s

As quickly as camera manufacturers are releasing these new cameras and formats, leading video recorder companies are releasing new products designed to make these incredibly large formats usable, streamable and of course recordable.

One of the greatest obstacles to recording and streaming megapixel and super-megapixel video has been the size of the files. Standard codec’s like H.264, while a great advancement over the even older M-JPEG format, were not designed for surveillance video and suffer from an inability to provide meaningful decreases in file size at the moderate (3-10) images-per-second surveillance footage is typically captured at.

Newer codec’s (such as our own Aztech codec) are optimized for megapixel security recording and are able to reduce the files size to roughly 1/10th the size of the video stream leaving the megapixel camera. Since this does take additional CPU cycles, it will limit the number of megapixel camera streams that can be recompressed, but depending on your frame-rate you should find covering areas like the parking lots and cash-handling areas is workable.

Technologies such as this is what is finally making megapixel not only a reality, but usable for the first time since you can actually fit your video on your DVR/NVR’s hard drives.

Where do we go from here?

Like any new technology, adoption will take time while the public becomes educated and understands not only the benefits, but the challenges as well and can clearly understand exactly how to best implement these systems. It is also imperative that manufacturers lead the way with factual information that allows users to be successful. 

File Attachments: 

High Definition Surveillance - Details Count.pdf

THE ROI STORY

Many dealers are worried about the possibility of a recession and its impact on their sales efforts. For as long as I can remember I have heard dealers lament that customers (primarily retailers) just do not understand the true Return On Investment (ROI) of a surveillance system.

Most dealers have well prepared and thought out arguments about how much a retailer can save on shrink reduction. They throw out scary statistics about the impact of internal theft and vendor theft, complete with industry percentages and reports used to calculate what the retailer’s likely losses are. They then switch to liability mitigation (like slip and falls) and try to hammer hard numbers that can be saved due to investing in surveillance. Lastly, they might even throw in a few bucks that can be saved on insurance. All together it seems like a no-brainer to the dealer. The payback appears to be significant, but the customer doesn’t bite. It’s not enough. It’s too intangible.

Retailers understand where their money comes from. It comes from their customers. Retailers understand where they their spend money. It’s on wages, goods and overhead. This is the real financial world where the retailer lives.

Certainly they understand that theft and liability can impact the bottom line, but the challenge of ROI relating to video surveillance are two-fold. One is that theft can be mitigated in a variety of ways. Video simply helps their mitigation strategy and therefore becomes a desire instead of a direct need. Secondly, liability is a risk issue. It might happen, it might not happen.

Retailers, like any business, are faced with limited resources and therefore must prioritize. They understand that spending more on providing a quality customer experience directly leads to more cash. They understand that putting in systems that can reduce labor directly leads to lower costs.

Surveillance cannot compete at the same priority level because it is simply a competing desire; something they know will help, but without the direct benefits that other expenses might lead to. So, more often than not it becomes a price shopping experience rather than a functionality shopping experience. If they can get it with pocket change they’ll do it, if not, in many cases they will keep shopping.

SELL WHAT THEY NEED

During these times of economic downturn dealers should stop and consider how the solutions they sell specifically address the basic and core needs of a business to drive revenues and reduce costs.

The good news is that for some time now manufacturers, including 3xLogic, have been designing value-added business intelligence applications built right into the surveillance system. These value-added features are intended to help manage the business in real-time, allowing retailers to be proactive instead of reactive. Systems today are designed to help retailers creatively address these key needs:

• Proactive, real-time management of the workforce including proper training, mitigation of negative incidents, and reduction in travel expenses.
• Real-time management of critical systems such as refrigeration, HVAC or even drive-thru lanes.
• Cost of goods control through management and reporting mechanisms, in addition to traditional loss prevention activities.
• Monitoring and management of the customer experience with strong mitigation and retraining capabilities.

The bottom line is that most dealers are still trying to sell Loss Prevention when there are much more effective and compelling reasons why a retailer should deploy a Video Management System. Not that LP isn’t important. It is important as part of an overall business management strategy, but by not giving your clients the full picture of what these solutions can do for them, you are not maximizing your sale potential nor are you providing the level of service to your client that you should.

Especially in this time of economic challenges, it becomes imperative that businesses (both the retailer and the dealer) understand how a correctly sold, deployed and utilized system can significantly contribute to the company’s revenues and cost reduction strategies.

The challenge for dealers is that they are great at what they do which is security and loss prevention. When it comes to addressing their clients other business needs … not so good. This leaves a large gap between what these multi-purpose solutions are capable of doing and what the client is presented with.

Dealers need strong partners that can help them tell the complete story. Dealers need strong partners that will help ensure that their customers are getting everything they can from these systems when they do make an investment.

If you don’t know one, I might be able to make a suggestion.

Multi-location retailers are always looking for ways to increase revenues and reduce costs, and lately they’ve been retasking their video surveillance systems to help.

Video surveillance has always been about cost reduction in the way of reduced shrink and liability, but retailers are using video management in new ways to significantly reduce operational costs and even increase revenue.

We are not talking about some down-the-road ROI. We are talking about a variety of methods such as remote employee management which frees up cash previously going to payroll and a significant reduction in travel expenses for regional managers.

At 3xLogic our vision has always been about developing business management tools based on the fundamental "security" video platform, so we always get excited when we hear how these tools are being used. As a result we’ve been talking to customers to find out more and the results are interesting so I will share a few with you.

Centralized Management

Operators are defining a new position titled "Centralized Manager" whose job is to directly interact with 2-20 remote stores via a centralized work control station connected via the internet to all of the stores. The centralized manager is able to be virtually inside multiple stores and interact with the employees and processes through the use of video, two-way audio and a variety of other dashboard tools and instant reports. This enables a variety of benefits including:

• Reduced in-store labor costs
• Reduction in required regional management
• Significantly lower travel costs
• Increased customer experience
• Reduction in inefficient labor
• Reduction in waste and losses
• Better management of systems and processes

Exception Reporting

Many people think of exception reporting as identifying specific risky point-of-sale transactions, but the managers we’ve been talking to are using their systems to identify other types of exceptions that they say are having a direct impact on revenues and keeping processes running correctly. Using this new type of exception reporting, managers are delivering real-time notifications to other departments, not just the loss prevention guys.

From maintenance to operations and even marketing folks, this data is providing a measurable value to the organization because it allows them to take real-time corrective actions before it impacts the business.

Operators are even saying that leveraging the video system for these purposes is not only less-expensive to deploy and operate than discrete systems; it is less complicated than ad-hoc solutions as well.

One case in point is the monitoring of refrigeration and freezer systems. Video surveillance systems designed to accommodate this feature allow maintenance personnel to be immediately notified at the first hint of a problem. This not only prevents costly losses and interruptions to the business, but it is extremely cost effective when it eliminates the need for additional monitoring equipment and notification systems.

Here’s a short list of what we heard from operators, but in reality is only limited by an organizations specific needs and imagination.

• Store opening and closing
• Status of refrigeration system
• Number of people waiting in line or at the drive-thru
• Receipts falling below a specified threshold
• Low inventory or stock
• Emergency alerts or duress alarms

Labor Management

While labor management might fall under Centralized Management it is really its own category because today’s systems provide such a robust array of tools to assist businesses in managing their workforce.

The obvious of course is the ability to see what is going on in the store and to interact with the employees as needed, but it really goes much further than that. Two specific examples are Call Logging and Interactive Training.

Call Logging - Select systems today allow you to not only record audio at the site which captures the interaction between the employees and customers, but also allow you to capture telephone or head-set (think drive-thru) communications as well. While subject to location specific laws, with proper notification, audio can be an important tool to help you properly mitigate customer complaints and initiate corrective training for your employees.

In addition, some systems allow you to capture the inbound and outbound Caller ID as well as call duration. Using this feature, you are able to instantly find a particular customers call and you can even generate reports identifying telephone priviledge abuse by employees.

Interactive Training - Most everyone knows that on-the-job training is critical, yet the time a manager spends with a new employee is usually too short to address the various issues that may come their way. We’ve heard from operators that are using their video surveillance solutions to not only retroactively review situations that arose earlier, but they are also allowing employees to signal for remote assistance in real-time. This allows a skilled person to provide immediate assistance (or training) as a specific incident is occurring.

In Closing

Video surveillance as a digital networked solution is an industry in its infancy. New solutions and new ways to use these solutions are popping up everyday which help businesses run more effectively and efficiently.

If you are using video surveillance, you should really be asking yourself if you’re getting everything you should from your investment. One of the best ways of figuring out how to apply this new technology is to look at how your peers are using it.

To help, 3xLogic is producing a series of webinars which showcase some of the alternate ways retailers are using their existing video solutions to help in other areas of their business.

If you have your own examples of how you are leveraging your video surveillance system, we’d love to hear from you.

If you sell to retail clients you are probably starting to get a few questions asking if your solution is PCI compliant. 3xLogic has recently completed an independent audit which confirms that our solution is indeed PCI Compliant, but we also recognize the confusion about what exactly PCI is, what compliance means, and how this fits into the bigger security picture.

To help answer some of these questions we have created a special section on our website about PCI and other forms of IT governance which you can reach by going to http://www.3xlogic.com/pci. There you will find a link to our whitepaper which speaks to IT managers about how PCI and video surveillance can coexist.

In addition, we have published an article on the web at www.ipvideomarket.info which further explains what PCI Compliance is and how it affects security dealers and integrators. John Honovich, who runs the ipvideomarket website, said he has received quite a bit of feedback from the industry about the timeliness and relevance of the article to the security industry.

In a nutshell, all retailers who take VISA or other forms of credit card are being required to protect their clients’ card data by adopting the standards set by the PCI Security Council.

While video surveillance typically does not directly handle credit card data, the video systems typically reside on the corporate network and therefore could provide an entry point for hackers to obtain this data. By ensuring that our solutions meet and exceed the requirements of PCI, we are able to help our clients insure that our solutions enhance their compliance efforts.

PCI is a big deal to retailers and PCI compliance is a big deal for anyone wanting to install 3rd party products on a PCI compliant network. However, it is just as important to understand what PCI is not.

PCI is only designed to protect one thing, and that is credit card data. While it may lead to a more secure network it does not provide guidelines for protecting the following:

• Personally Identifiable Information (HIPAA)
• Corporate Financial Data (SOX)
• A company’s other confidential and proprietary data
• The audio/video data within the video surveillance system

Total network security of a surveillance product is just as important as PCI compliance and we have taken proactive steps to ensure not only PCI compliance but total network security.

In doing so we must realize that total network security is a moving target. At 3xLogic we have put a variety of programs in place to address this issue including:

• Designing a highly secure architecture that does not utilize highly vulnerable technologies such as web applications and other vulnerable OS services.
• Building security into our entire development lifecycle with the participation of our dealers and end-user clients.
• Providing full documentation, procedures and training to deals and end-users for the safe deployment and maintenance of our products.
• Keeping an open and structured communications channel with dealers and end-users for new threats, proper mitigation and to assist in non-standard deployments.

Offering a product with total security requires the involvement of all parties including the dealer and the end-user client. If you have a project that requires compliance with any form of governance such as PCI, HIPAA or SOX let us know early on and we can work with you to determine if our solution will work, or not.

In addition, feel free to share your thoughts or ask a question in the comments below.

You may not know it, but 3xLogic has been providing our solutions to the security market under many different names including Vigil and a variety of OEM names, throughout the US and the World since 1997.

Now for the first time we offer you a chance to have a direct relationship with us. This new relationship gives us the ability to more directly meet your specific needs and help you to grow your business.

The Vigil line of products offers a wide array of of solutions for many industries including gaming, retail, education, hospitality and transportation. Offering the latest in video capture, storage and streaming along with full support for everything from traditional cameras to the latest IP camera technologies, the Vigil solution is designed to help companies not only manage, but fully utilize their visual data.

Along with our new direct-to-the-dealer structure, we also bring along our culture here at 3xLogic which is to be accessible and responsive to your needs and thoughts. The ability to instantaneously chat with our team members and provide feedback in our blogs give you the power to influence our direction and develop better products which more directly meet yours and your clients needs.

Feel free to take a browse of our new site, and be sure to let us know how we can help you.

You should know is that once you create a free account, you will have the ability to access additional information including product literature and direct contact info. You can create a free account by clicking here.

Also be sure to stop by our contact page and chat with us in real time. You don’t need any special chat software, only your browser. You can chat with us by clicking here.

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