Ed Christmas understands the potential complexities that bringing high-definition video onto the network can entail.
As the managing principal of Sology Solutions, one of our Premier Certified safety and security integrators, he’s worked for the last couple of years to define a video strategy for his customer Dallas County. The plan involved recommending the newly re-architected Cisco Video Surveillance Manager 7.0 as the cornerstone of a business transformation project that goes far beyond just simply improving safety and security for citizens and employees. It aims to help improve the way that services are delivered to citizens.
A key factor in Sology’s choice as a partner lies in the ease of deploying this new video surveillance solution, which was completely rebuilt from the ground up for very large scale video deployments. In this video Ed describes how he was able to go into the customer at 10am in the morning, deploy the software in a virtualised Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) environment, set up the IP video surveillance cameras and have the whole system up and running and providing operational HD video feeds back to Dallas County’s Tax Assessor office within hours. His team were on their way back to the office by 2pm that afternoon.
By taking advantage of another key Cisco innovation, the Cisco medianet proxy service, Ed’s engineers were able to automate the configuration of cameras on the network. MSP is a function of the Cisco switching infrastructure that builds on innovations such as SmartPorts. Using MSP, the network automatically recognizes the new device plugged into the switch port as a video surveillance camera, allocates it an IP address, places it into the correct VLAN, reserves the right amount of bandwidth for delivering video streams to operators and prioritizes the video traffic automatically.
Today, about half of the video surveillance cameras sold are IP (versus analog) cameras. Manufacturers are using video surveillance to ensure safety and security on plant floors and to reduce shrinkage in warehouse and retail locations.
Neil Peterson, the senior manager for wireless marketing at Emerson Process Management was recently quoted in a Control Engineering article, saying that “process plants identified by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as critical to the country’s infrastructure must be secured against all threats: cyber and physical”.
In support of the growing demand for IP-based video surveillance in industries including manufacturing, Cisco recently introduced Video Surveillance Manager 7.0 with a suite of hyper-scalable connected physical security solutions. These can help manufacturers support their video surveillance deployments and configurations in a hyper-scalable and flexible manner.
Cisco’s Guido Jouret, General Manager Emerging Technologies and CTO, discusses Video Surveillance Manager 7
Video Surveillance Manager 7.0, along with Cisco’s related end-to-end Connected Physical Security Solutions give plant and IT managers access to robust video surveillance scalability, network aware intelligence, streamlined implementation and simplified management.
For more information, please see Cisco’s recent press release or contact your local Cisco account representative.
Many of you following this blog are very likely familiar with the Media Services Interface (MSI) and the key role MSI plays in the Medianet architecture. The MSI is an SDK residing on rich media applications and endpoints that makes the network and applications smarter together. Over the past several months the MSI has been increasingly integrated across a wide range of Cisco applications and endpoints. The path forward looks very exciting with plans for many more rich media applications integrating with the MSI.
The Cisco Developer Network program for Medianet system management partners has been in place for some time now and has been instrumental in helping 3rd party network management system partners leverage the benefits of medianet from a network standpoint. We are pleased to announce the expansion of this program to include MSI interoperability verification and testing for system management partners. For the first time, system management partners that are focused on the endpoint and application side of the equation can use the MSI to proactively monitor application performance and accelerate troubleshooting.
One of the key objectives of Medianet is to integrate a smarter network with various media endpoints in order to simplify end-to-end deployments and operations and to enhance quality of experience for the end user. We are very happy to announce Plugfest as a strategic step forward towards meeting this objective. Plugfest is an Interoperability Verification Testing (IVT) event to be hosted at the ASIS show (booth 213) in Philadelphia, September 10- 12, 2012. Plugfest at the ASIS will be focused on verifying IP Surveillance Cameras within a Cisco network.
We are very pleased to announce Plugfest for you. Plugfest launches the Media Services Proxy (MSP) capability as part of Cisco Medianet solutions. This would be a very good opportunity for you to get your cameras verified with the Cisco’s Medianet-enabled network by just plugging your camera in. There is no additional development or change required on the end points provided there is compliance to standard based protocols like RTSP, SDP and mDNS, which MSP is based on. On successful verification, your organization along with qualified camera models and the capabilities they have been tested against would be listed on the CDN (Cisco Developer Network) partner page. You would also get the Cisco CDN “Compatible” logo that can be shared externally! You can find all details on Plugfest on the CDN MSP portal. Read More »
In a recent Forbes article Guido Jouret, Cisco’s Emerging Technologies CTO, talks about how in today’s business world all companies require video strategies to achieve successful collaboration. I couldn’t agree more. I recognize however that implementation of video technology like telepresence raises concerns about network capacity. While high-quality, secure video enables more face-to-face interactions and helps build deeper relationships, an insufficient video implementation can ruin the user experience and counter potential productivity gains.
So how will your network support video collaboration? The short answer: With the right enterprise-level solution for video implementation, your network will operate seamlessly and video connections will be as personal as in-room meetings.
