Dantel still looking to marry up

Peace of mind comes in part from the ability to control a situation — not from simply knowing about it. No control; no peace of mind. That's why monitoring remote sites and equipping them with alarms have historically lacked a certain comfort level.

When an alarm goes off in a remote equipment cabinet, it signifies trouble. But too often the cause of the trouble is indeterminate from afar, and the solution requires manual intervention — from a person several hours away. Thankfully, next-generation surveillance and monitoring systems are providing more of the control that leads to peace of mind. They are doing it with out-of-band remote access “married up” with intelligent software that makes decisions based on a variety of telemetry inputs and also makes use of event-based video surveillance.

In this case, marrying up is not the trait of some desperate Charles Dickens character, but an integration of well-proven monitoring techniques with sophisticated software, multiple access technologies and cheap, but quality, surveillance gear, namely video cameras.

Dantel has provided well-proven monitoring and surveillance solutions for more than 35 years. Alan Hutcheson, president and CEO of Dantel, said his company is the Cadillac of the industry in terms of robustness in remote monitoring. “We have certification in virtually any area of technical requirements you can think of,” he said.

Now it has something else — thanks to marrying up and its third generation of surveillance products. Not all carriers are ready for some of the features in the product line Hutcheson began rehabilitating in 2000, but they should be, he said.

“By far, it is less expensive to deploy remote surveillance capabilities than it is to place a guard at your site or continue to escalate your insurance premiums,” Hutcheson said.

In late March, Dantel introduced its Disaster Resistant Event Network (DREN), a remote monitoring and communication system designed to capture and transport critical event data from remote or inaccessible locations. The DREN incorporates various sensory, video, solar and encrypted wireless WAN technologies and uses Dantel's newly enhanced WebMon products: WebMon Edge and WebMon Matrix.

WebMon Edge is a fully integrated remote monitoring and surveillance platform that comes with a fiber-optic interface, Ethernet switch, GPS and cellular communication for out-of-band access and control.

“You need that out-of-band surveillance capability because when things start failing, they aren't able to be controlled with inband,” Hutcheson said.

One of the new enhancements Hutcheson spoke of is video surveillance. He said it has changed the field of opportunity for his company by incorporating physical security, including video, into its portfolio of solutions. “We can't be another telco or a Panasonic, so we marry up our components and control systems with video, which most people have neither the knowledge nor the ability to put together,” Hutcheson said.

The trick to video surveillance, he said, is making the camera's activation and control events-driven. Cameras can be activated by the detection of hot spots, fires, toxic gas, leaking water and more. The control system directs the camera to different locations based on the trigger. Hutcheson said the industry has only scratched the surface of video surveillance.

The emergence of MPEG-4 video compression helps make this a more viable product by reducing the amount of bandwidth necessary to transport video images.

One of the ancillary effects of the growing demand for video surveillance is already showing up, as Frost & Sullivan said in May: Demand will push the North American encoder and video server markets to $575.6 million by 2013 from the $110 million it generated in 2006.