If you have established a business or consultancy around VoIP and IP Telephony, expanding your product/service offerings to include IP Video Surveillance should be easy. If you are selling your customers IP PBX and/or hosted IP Centrex services, many of these same customers will have needs for surveillance. The surveillance industry, much like telephony, is moving away from legacy CCTV (Closed Circuit Television – Analog) to IP based platforms….which plays right into your sweet spot.

If you have experience deploying, administering and maintaining IP Communications platforms such as Asterisk, FreeSwitch, Switchvox, Trixbox, etc….picking up the fundamentals of IP Video Surveillance will be a snap.

First Off – Pick an NVR (Network Video Recorder) Platform. There are literally dozens of vendors offering both Windows and Linux based platforms. A few of the more popular products include:

Axis Camera Station
Milestone
ONSSI
Mobotix MX Control Center
Exacq
ZoneMinder (Open Source!)

ZoneMinder is the closest thing to an “Asterisk equivalent”, OSS project….and it is a capable platform that runs on a Linux footprint….but lacks the huge, vibrant developer community that surrounds Asterisk.

Second – Download eval software. All of these vendors offer trial-ware. Zoneminder, as mentioned, is completely free and open source.

Third – Build an NVR Server. A standard Intel based PC or server is all you need. P4 or better, Gig of RAM and a decent amount of hard drive storage. One Note of Interest – there are a number of video formats supported by platform and camera vendors. MJPEG and MPEG4 are most prevalent, but many vendors are moving to H.264 as it offers more compression while maintaining image quality. Many IP cameras support both MJPEG and MPEG4 video codecs, and they are user selectable. Video cameras supporting H.264 are just now coming to market. H.264 offers several advantages in that it cuts down on bandwidth requirements (much like G.729 versus G.711) and storage requirements for archiving video footage. A handy Bandwidth and Disk Size Calculator is available for free download here.

Next – Get an IP Camera. There are a wide variety of IP Video Camera manufacturers, offering a range of products. Cameras come in fixed view or PTZ (Pan, Tilt and Zoom) varieties, as well as a range of resolutions and advanced features + form factors depending upon your application. Leading IP Video Camera manufacturers include:
Axis
Mobotix
Panasonic
Vivotek

Interesting Note – Similar to analog FXS gateways in the VoIP world which allow for integration of legacy telecommunications gear like analog phones and fax machines….Video Servers (Encoders) are available to facilitate the integration of legacy CCTV (Analog, Closed Circuit Television) cameras with an IP based NVR platform. If your customer has a significant investment in analog security cams, why not supplement their existing solution by integrating it with a more feature rich, IP-Based NVR platform? This “Hybrid” approach should be familiar to you from the VoIP world. You can take a look at some of these video server / gateway products here. Similar to VoIP gateways, video servers come in 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 and 24 port densities (channels), depending upon the number of analog cameras you want to attach. They also encode analog video to MJPEG, MPEG4 or H.264 depending on the model you choose. Refer to the manufacturer specification to see the codecs supported.

Finally – Get busy learning the in’s and out’s of the solution. If you have a solid grasp of TCP/IP networking fundamentals, you’re 90% of the way there. IP Video Surveillance utilizes the same Client / Server relationship you are accustomed to with VoIP / Telephony. The NVR Sofware is installed on a server or PC on your network, and accessed via a GUI from a browser or on the local machine.

Configuring the video camera is as easy as plugging the camera into your LAN, letting it get an initial IP address via DHCP, and then logging into the camera itself (via the built-in webserver in the camera) and resetting it to a fixed IP address. Next, in much the same fashion as you would create an extension on an IP PBX and provision an IP phone….log into the NVR server and configure the camera server-side.

Once you have the camera configured, there are a range of other features you can play with, such as motion detection, software PTZ controls for manipulating cameras remotely, alarms, notifications and even advanced software video analytics on some platforms.

In a post-911 world, demand for video surveillance is exploding. Businesses….Local, State and Federal Government Agencies, Educational Institutions, and even private residential users are all driving demand for next generation, IP based surveillance solutions.

Like I said….What are you waiting for?

Nermetes Research recently honored several IP based phone system vendors with PilotHouse awards which recognizes companies for their outstanding achievement and superior performance in areas such as customer service, technological innovation, technical service, value and strategic product development.

Not surprisingly, none of them were open source systems or based on an open source platform.

Why am I not surprised?

Well, because that is what I have come to expect; especially from analysts who, for all intent and purposes “take the money and run” when it comes to these awards and it is a shame, especially since Nermetes’ Robin Gareiss states,

“This research is a must-have for companies evaluating a new VOIP strategy, or reassessing an existing one because it relies on real experiences from real customers.”

Take a look at some of the winners: ShoreTel, Seimens, Avaya, Nortel, Cisco, 3Com, a venerable “who’s who” of the old guard. I have news for Nermetes and everyone else: I would take a SwitchVox or trixbox solution over one of the above any day. What is it that makes Shoretel the best phone system on the market? What does it have that other systems do not? I have used the system for over a year and to be honest was not impressed in any way, shape or form.

Here is some real advice, from a real customer, one who has sold IP based phone systems and has used almost every system on the market:

Don’t be fooled by research conducted for the entire purpose of giving those paying for it a badge to wear and something to market.

When it comes right down to it, there is more power, flexibility and value in an open source based phone system than in these proprietary solutions. These proprietary solutions, unknown to many, are traps. They pull you in with savvy marketing and well paid sales professionals, then hold you hostage with licensing, last generation technology, lousy business systems integration and of course a hefty bill.

Do yourself a favor. If you are in the market for a phone system, take a look at all of your options, not just the ones that pay to have their solutions talked about.

On paper, software only VoIP solutions seem like a perfect fit for small medium businesses (SMB’s).

These services can take many forms, such as a hosted VoIP offering or a Voice 2.0 call aggregation service. These deployments typically cost less (since there is no or little physical equipment), are delivered by a service provider who typically handles the service, support and on-going maintenance and in general seem a lot more simple for the SMB. For those who sell these types of solutions, they often refer to their offering as a, “no brainer.”

Within this simplicity, however, lies a fair amount of confusion – created by the fact that software only VoIP solutions, for most non-technical SMB’s, are a far cry from the user experience they have become accustom to. A funny thing happens when one tries to change the user experience – they revolt. People do not inherently accept change and with something as long standing (and in many ways as stagnant as telecommunications) it is difficult to not believe that software only VoIP solutions are getting a fair amount of push-back from SMB’s.

This isn’t written to discredit them (software only VoIP solutions); in fact, software only VoIP solutions is truly the future, but that future is many, many years ahead of us. For now, I see those offering software only VoIP solutions to the SMB continuing to struggle – selling the invisible is tough, especially in a sector that has been hardware-centric for such a long time.

What do you think?