WestPoint · Verkada Command
Verkada does not sell only software: it sells the camera and the system together, managed from a web page and with no recorder at the site. That removes half a list of classic problems and puts others in their place. Here are the two sides.
It is the underlying change, and everything else comes out of it.
In a normal installation the video goes to a recorder that lives at the site: the one that fills up, the one nobody updates, the one nobody looks at until it fails and, when things go really wrong, the one they take away with the recordings inside.
Verkada takes it away. Each camera records inside itself and what goes up continuously is thumbnails and data about what it has seen, enough to open the timeline of any camera at any site. The piece you ask for is fetched from the camera at that moment.
It solves the problem of anyone with twenty shops or eight schools and nobody technical in them: no twenty recorders to maintain, no twenty networks to open, and the day somebody leaves the company their access to all twenty is removed at once.
And the other side, which arrives just as fast: the system and the hardware go together. The cameras are theirs, the software is theirs and the way in is their web page. There is no way to keep just half of it.
Five things, and here not one of them can be swapped for another.
Not one of them is really technical. All five are contract questions, and they get answered before you buy or they never get answered.
Where the recordings live and who can get in. The video, in the camera; the index, the users and the permissions, at the supplier — which by design has an administration route into your system. That calls for minimum permissions, mandatory two-factor, an access log you can see, and in writing who at the manufacturer can see what. There have been incidents like that in this industry, and trust does not prevent them.
What happens when the line goes down. Recording carries on, because it records in the camera. What you lose is the console: no live view from outside, no alerts, no search. For most installations that is fine; for a control room watching live, it is not.
The cost of uploading video. Continuously it uploads little. The usage appears when somebody watches and it multiplies by each person watching at the same time: a shop with a tight line works right up to the day of the incident, which is when three people open six cameras.
RGPD and international transfers. A supplier from outside the EU: you have to be able to explain to a supervisory authority which region the data is stored in, which processor contract and which safeguards cover the transfer, and what analysis was done beforehand. You ask for it in writing for your contract and your region. And then there is the part that gets forgotten: telling the staff, and making the record of processing activities say what really happens.
And the dependency. The day you want to leave, the cameras do not go with you: they cannot be reused with another system. The recording is got out by exporting while the licence is alive, and when it expires there is no local way in to see what is inside. It is not a hidden defect, it is the model — what you cannot do is find it out in year five.
Per camera and per term: the camera comes with a licence of several years that includes the console, updates, support and the equipment warranty while it is alive. It is easy to budget for and it has one consequence worth saying out loud — when the term ends, it gets renewed. It is not optional maintenance: it is what keeps the system standing.
As you grow the cost is linear. What gets neglected is the calendar: if the cameras came in batches, the renewals fall in different years. In any proposal with this model we put in writing the term, what it includes and the cost of the following years; comparing this with a perpetual licence by looking only at the first year is the most common way of getting it wrong, in both directions.
It is the platform that most clearly either fits or does not. There is almost never a middle ground.
You have many similar sites and few technical people: retail, schools, clinics, offices. If you want video, doors and alarms on the same screen with no integration project. If you value a new employee knowing how to use it in ten minutes. And if the installation is new, because then hardware tied to the system costs less to accept.
You already have good, recent cameras you do not want to throw away and the connector does not cover what is there. If the specification requires that the recordings do not leave your premises, or that the supplier has no administration route. If you watch live and a line failure is unacceptable. Or if house policy is not to depend on a single supplier for hardware and software: here that cannot be met.
It comes with plenty of it, and well sorted: search for people and vehicles, filters by colour or by clothing, number plates on the models that carry it, alerts by zone, occupancy and heat maps. It runs in the camera and in their cloud, so there is nothing to set up — and that is what makes people use it instead of leaving it switched off, which is the fate of half the analytics ever sold.
What you add is limited by the same design that makes it comfortable: the functions are the manufacturer's and there is no way to put a detector of your own inside their camera. If your case is «alert me when this machine does this», the answer will be the closest function in the catalogue.
The ceiling: it is search and alert analytics, not understanding. It is very good at finding the person in the red T-shirt among six hours of recording; it does not say whether what they are doing is working or is a problem. For many installations that is enough; for a plant, a loading bay or a site, it is not.
And the recommendation, with its warning: in the same house there is IRIS Neural, the NVMS from Infinity Neural, the other company in the group — our own product, and we say so before recommending it. In many installations they live together: the VMS governs cameras and recording, IRIS brings the understanding of the scene. Here we have to be honest about the how: their cameras do not hand over an open stream to any system, so living together is solved with cameras of our own at the points that have to be understood, or by checking beforehand what access to the video your licence allows.
With a platform like this half the trade disappears and the other half weighs more.
It is the platform that needs a technician least in order to work, and the one that most needs somebody who is really in charge of the permissions.
Almost nobody chooses video software by looking at a single platform. These are neighbours in the same conversation, and the index leads to all twenty.
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That is the Verkada question and the customer answers it, not us. If you tell us how many sites you have, which cameras are installed, how many people are going to watch and what your data policy requires of you, we will tell you whether this makes your life simpler or whether in your case the price of the convenience is too high.
