City surveillance initiatives help drive Genetec innovation
When you are a software company whose vision is bringing about an actual convergence of logical and physical security systems, it would be wise to possess a leadership team that mirrors the unique risk-based client approach.
For more than 15 years Genetec President, CEO and founder Pierre Racz and his executive staff have steadily built upon its ground-breaking IP video management software and their early days as a software R&D company to become leaders in unified IP-based video surveillance, access control, and license plate recognition (LPR) platforms. But as the security environment evolves and clients’ needs become more diverse and financially driven, Racz admits he had to reassess the vendor-client dynamic; especially in specific vertical markets like public safety.
Racz says that asking our public safety officials to do more with less is another main driver for convergence to the cloud. If you calculate the floor space and cooling devoted to your data storage, along with the care and feeding of your servers, most agencies will see a lower cost of ownership when moving functionality to the cloud. But he is also quick to add that you can’t expect public agencies to make long-term and expensive investments without some guarantees.
“More and more we are getting involved with engineering outcomes and getting compensated for results. If we don’t provide results, we don’t get paid as a company. When an agency comes to us and says they can’t afford our solution, we ask them what is their real cost of unavailability,” says Racz. “Then we ask if we can help you reengineer that issue will you reward us for that solution? So basically, we are helping them share the risk.”
When you employ the risk versus reward model, which has been an insurance industry standard for years, Racz figures it is easier to gain buy-in from a client who might not have been willing to take the plunge.
“Ultimately, what is a software company? We are an insurance company. Writing software is a very complex and labor intensive endeavor. So what we have done is spread that risk around 20 to 30,000 entities around the world. Engineering outcomes is just another form of insurance,” insists Racz.
To that end, finding the right engineering solutions for the vertical markets served is crucial. So it is for the city-wide surveillance space, of which Genetec has been a major player for more than a decade. Its Security Center solution provides a unified platform from which a city can manage both its third-party security and business functions in a seamless manner while also providing a standardized base of security operations for IP-centric video surveillance, access control, and license plate recognition.
Racz says that growing with the needs of a public safety client is in the DNA of the Security Center solution. It allows for the implementation of a phased growth plan that corresponds with government and agency budget cycles, which ultimately provides an opportunity to create strategic roadmaps for technology upgrades. By allowing a municipality to roll out basic IP-based security services as budgets evolve, both client and vendor share in the vision.
This spirit of collaborative partnership with its clients also allows Genetec to benefit from real-world experiences that drive its formidable R&D initiatives. The Genetec engineering team calls this “Driving the Innovation Lifecycle”, which means finding new approaches to software support and upgrades that ensure a client maximizes its investment and guarantees a vibrant technology roadmap.
“It is very important to us that we consistently grow new and compelling technology,” says Jimmy Palatsoukas, the Senior Manager of Product Marketing, who revealed that his company has increased its R&D spend by more than 18% over the past several years. “We put a high value on reinvesting, and as a private company, we feel that is our obligation to drive revenue back into our solutions.”
Some of that R&D reinvestment will be on display as Genetec unveils its Mission Control solution at the upcoming ISC West security event in early April. Built on top of the Security Center platform, Mission Control is being billed as a “decision support system” that will help clients looking to centralize management and data gathering strategies, policy, and procedure, along with managing situational awareness ques and alerts.
“Mission Control will permit you to make optimum decisions as fast as possible with the best information available, taking data from all sensory and alert resources and inputs,” explains Andrew Elvish, VP of Marketing and Product Management. “This is different from a PSIM in that it takes out the complexity of management since it integrates directly with any end-point device. The bottom line is this solution does away with the brittle nature of the traditional PSIM.”
For Racz, it has always been about client flexibility. The entire engineering team stresses the approach that one should manage your security environment, not the infrastructure. Racz has worked closely with many public safety entities that are currently migrating to the Security Center Cloud solution because of the flexibility it offers. Moving to the cloud provides several management and cost saving efficiencies, like reduced hardware investments, removing the burden of service from your IT department, clients can grow their cloud functionality as needed, and cloud service is a subscription model so a client only pays for services used.
“Clients are attracted to Genetec’s hybrid solution. It is a symmetrical hybrid cloud. You can store data on premise or in the cloud. So we have customers that will store 30 days on premise and say, two years on the cloud,” relates Racz. “We had a customer who moved to the cloud because they were storing the interviews of capital offense cases in a large storage array on site. When they couldn’t get government officials to give them funds to update and enlarge their storage capacity, they had some big issues. Their system eventually crashed and they lost all this extremely valuable data. They actually had to release several prisoners because data for their cases were unavailable. The CTO of that large city told us he couldn’t get to the cloud fast enough.”
In the end, it all gets back to basics for Racz, which is software. He remembers a one-on-one meeting he recently had with Microsoft COO Kevin Turner. “I was struck by something he said. In the not too distant future, every company will be a software company.”
He sees that becoming reality sooner than later. This month Genetec hosted a pair of Kansas City police officers at one of their high-level programming workshops. “These are gun-carrying police officers who write code that is specific to their city surveillance needs. But we are taking them through our methods so they will be able to write code that is more modular, more testable, and conforming to international standards. I’m so excited about this relationship. This is the reality of convergence,” says Racz.
