WestPoint · Video software · Genetec Security Center · Omnicast
Security Center carries the video, the doors and the number plates in the same system, with the same clock and the same list of users. That solves a real problem and it is paid for in licences and in project hours.
Omnicast is the video part of Genetec Security Center. Synergis is the doors part and AutoVu the number plates part. All three, the same system.
With the video from one manufacturer, the doors from another and the number plates from a third, reconstructing an incident is manual work: you look for the time in one system, you take it across to the other and you find they are forty seconds apart.
Here the forced door and the camera watching it are the same event in the same list. That is all «unified» means, and it is quite a lot: what goes down is not the price, it is the time it takes to understand what happened.
What it is not: cheaper or quicker to build than joining three systems with a cable. The unification is paid for before you start and it pays back later, on the day of the incident or the day of the inspection.
In pieces that Genetec calls roles. Understanding that decides how many servers you need and what stops working when one of them goes down.
The Directory keeps the configuration in a SQL Server database. If it stops, the operators cannot get in, even though the cameras carry on recording. The Archiver is the one that records, and it is the piece that multiplies as you grow.
Everything being a role means a role moves from machine to machine without rebuilding the system: you start with one server and you end with eight, and that is why it turns up where there is going to be growth.
Redundancy is licensed separately: duplicating the Directory, or an Archiver on standby that picks up the cameras. A system sold as redundant whose main server nobody has switched off in front of you is not tested, it is configured.
Federation joins sites and each one stays the owner of its own. What the brochure does not say: a federated camera does not behave like a local one, there are functions that do not travel, and the link decides how many images the control room watches at once.
And when you go from five sites to thirty, the problem stops being the video: repeated names, users who exist twice with different permissions and nobody able to say what version each site is on. Updating has an order, and skipping it leaves the control room blind for a while.
The word «native» saves work. It does not remove it, and between those two things there are weeks.
Synergis being the same platform really is less work: no gateway and no two databases to keep in step. Decisions still remain: who owns the list of people, how someone gets taken off it the same day, what happens with a contractor who is there for three weeks.
With intruder detection, the panels come in as units of the system. Compatibility is by model and firmware, not by brand: «it integrates with that brand» and «it integrates with the panel you already have» are different sentences, and the second one gets verified before signing.
There is an SDK and a web API, and SDK connections are licensed. With the usual warning: whatever gets developed has to be maintained every time the platform version goes up.
Per camera connection and per module, so growing is predictable and can be worked out. On top goes the manufacturer's annual maintenance plan, which is what lets you update.
If that plan is left to lapse, the system carries on recording and stays where it is; picking it up two years later is not always fixed by paying for the two years. It is the invoice that surprises anyone who compared quotations looking only at the first one.
Four items are licensed separately and disappear from the initial sizing: Directory redundancy, federation, SDK connections and part of the analytics and the number plates. Outside Genetec sit SQL Server and the storage, which is what really grows.
The same platform, in two different installations, is a good buy and an overspend.
Several sites that have to be watched from one place, a control room with people on shift, and doors, video and number plates that have to be cross-checked. Plus your own IT: this is a system of servers and databases, not a recorder.
One site, thirty cameras, no control room and nobody to administer anything. Half the purchase is room to grow that is never going to be used, and the other half is complexity that makes you ring the integrator for small things.
Someone who has one site today and says they are going to have five. It can make sense to pay today for tomorrow's architecture, if the decision is written down and has dates. «We are going to grow» with no plan pays for federation licences that nobody switches on.
Design, sizing, deployment, migration and maintenance. Put like that it says nothing, so here it is in decisions.
There are two teams involved and it is almost never written down who does what. That gap leaves systems without updating for three years.
IT keeps servers, backups, network, database and update windows, and does it better than anyone on the security side.
Security keeps users and permissions, recording and alarm rules, and who can export video and what gets logged. These are judgement decisions, and in the hands of IT they get settled by whatever is easiest to configure.
Partitions exist for exactly that split, with one limit: moving a camera from one Archiver to another, changing the retention days or touching a storage scheme are one-click actions with consequences in terabytes. They do not belong in the operator profile.
The integrator is left with the version jumps, the architecture changes, the sites that come in and out of the federation, and the diagnosis when it is not clear whether it is the camera, the network, the drive or the platform. That hour is half the reason to have a contract.
Training: half a day for the operator at their own position and with their own cameras, two days for whoever administers the security side, and a separate session for IT. With a written script for whoever joins next year, because someone will.
The uncomfortable sentence first: the analytics included in a VMS detect events defined in advance, and that is not understanding what is going on.
Security Center carries more than motion detection —which is geometry, pixels changing inside a rectangle, and the reason a shift fills up with alerts because of a branch—: object classification, searches over what has been recorded and the whole number plate side. And it is worth knowing that a good part of the fine work is done by the camera: «the VMS» analytics are very often camera analytics shown in the VMS.
The real limit: it works when the event can be drawn. Someone enters this zone, a car stops here for two minutes, this number plate is on a list. It covers most of what gets asked for and it is enough in many installations.
What it does not do is understand the scene. That two people are arguing. That a worker came in without a hard hat where today there is a crane and yesterday there was not. Asking that of rule-based analytics ends in rules that get more and more complicated and then switch themselves off.
What follows is a recommendation with an interested party, so it goes declared: in the same house there is IRIS Neural, the NVMS from Infinity Neural, the other company in the group. It is our product, and we would rather you knew it by reading this line.
In real installations they live together: Security Center governs the cameras, the permissions and the recording, which is what you have already paid for; IRIS adds the understanding of the scene. And if what you need is what Omnicast already does, Omnicast is enough and we say so.
Twenty platforms is a lot to compare blind. In the index they are ordered by what really tells them apart, which is not the list of functions.
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If you already have it, tell us how many sites, how many cameras and when it was last updated, and we will tell you what has to be fixed and what can wait. If you are weighing it up, the useful question is what you are going to look like three years from now: that decides whether it is more than you need or a fit. If it is more than you need, we will tell you.
