Roger Hockaday, director of marketing for EMEA at Sunnyvale, California-based Aruba, said the company won’t actually be selling video surveillance technology, but by testing and certifying interoperability with Copenhagen, Denmark-based Milestone Systems and Jefferson City, Missouri-based Wren Solutions it is enabling its system integrator partners to offer the ability on its networks.
In a typical video surveillance solution, hardware costs account for 20-25% of the overall cost, and professional services run to 80% of the overall cost, said Hockaday. I have been told by one partner that they expect to see a 60% reduction in their costs in installing video surveillance over an Aruba Wireless Network.
He said these cost savings accrue as a result of co-locating and co-connecting cameras with APs, the use of digital rather than analog cameras, which means more features and fewer cameras, and the fact that surveillance can now be overlaid onto an existing WLAN without the need to configure any additional VLANs.
After the appalling VirginiaTech massacre in the US earlier this year, we were approached by quite a few educational establishments looking to deploy video surveillance across their campus, and have introduced changes to our software that enables easier deployment of video systems, he said.
Both Milestone and Wren offer video management software, the idea being for the Aruba partners to be able to choose which system them want to deploy for a customer, with support for a range of IP cameras.
Our View
This move by Aruba, while ostensibly coming in response to the VirginiaTech tragedy as mentioned by Hockaday, is also part of a broader move by WLAN vendors to offer video surveillance capabilities on their infrastructure. In March last year Aruba’s primary competitor in enterprise WLAN, Cisco, acquired SyPixx Networks specifically so that it could offer its video management software as part of what the vendor calls its Intelligent Converged Environment, which covers both wired and wireless networks.
The difference there, apart from the fact that Cisco was buying and thus offering the technology in its own right rather than partnering with other companies, is that the SyPixx technology is designed to enable existing analog cameras to operate on an IP network, whereas the Aruba offering required the cameras themselves to be IP-enabled.
