Telco Systems to offer managed surveillance opportunity

Telco Systems is leveraging its parent company’s purchase of Vigilant Technologies to enable its service provider customers to offer managed video surveillance services as part of integrated voice and data offerings.

What Telco Systems and Vigilant – both BATM (LSE: BVC) companies – can provide together is an end-to-end solution for offering a managed video surveillance service to large businesses, municipal governments, school districts and other clients, said Irit Gillath, vice president of product line management for Telco Systems.

“We have everything from the cameras to the video management systems to the digital video recorders and network video recorders,” Gillath said. The system is designed as an IP-based surveillance system but also can incorporate analog cameras that may already be deployed, Gillath said.

The systems are designed to be deployed in shopping malls, city centers, school campuses and hospitals to provide centralized security service, based on video surveillance. As an intelligent IP solution, the Vigilant system can detect changes or anomalies in the video stream and based on embedded analytics, call attention to potential problems, Gillath said. Where older analog video surveillance systems were largely passive and required the continuous scrutiny of human attendants, Vigilant’s video management system provides instant analysis of what is being watched.

“It’s called ‘monitoring by exception,’” Gillath said. “If there is a bag or other item left unattended, if there is a vehicle going in the wrong direction or people in areas where they are not supposed to be, the system provides an alert. If the picture remains static for too long or someone blocks the picture, it triggers an alarm.”

Multiple service provider customers are currently looking into the new offering from Telco Systems and Vigilant. While not widely known yet in the US, Vigilant is well-established in other markets, with 150,000 channels installed worldwide, including the security systems for the Hong Kong airport, the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Chicago and the Hilton hotels in Hawaii, Gillath said.

“This is a new business model for service providers,” Gillath said. “Video surveillance can be part of the overall bundled service offering. Network service providers also use video surveillance for their own locations, including cellular backhaul networks, colocation facilities or lab facilities.”