Subscriber Discussion

Money Being Wasted On PSIM

UI
Undisclosed Integrator #1
Oct 07, 2014

I am presently involved in the deployment of PSIM for a fairly large customer. The product was over-sold from a 40,000 foot view, and now on the ground we are finding that although a few of the bells and whistles work most of the time, the product lacks an astonishing amount of basic functionality (like the ability to enter notes about an event or to playback recorded video at more than 1x speed.) The customer was sold on the efficiency of having a unified, graphical, single user interface that operators could utilize with less training and more intuition, but the reality is that they rely on the native interfaces for each system that PSIM was intented to replace even more than ever. I do not foresee [any] single product providing the depth of features or granularity of control that most native user interfaces provide, and while PSIM is a great "show-and-tell" piece, it still has a long way to go before it will be practical. Instead, the tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars being wasted on PSIM could be much better spent improving the depth of integration between all the related systems, and on end user training in the proper operation of the systems they are expected to use on a day-to-day basis.

NOTICE: This comment was moved from an existing discussion: Is There A Market For PSIM?

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JH
John Honovich
Oct 07, 2014
IPVM

Thanks for sharing that.

It is, unfortunately, an all too common story.

You raise excellent points both about:

  • The lack of functional depth
  • The need to still rely on native systems.

One fundamental barrier that exists is that the PSIM, as a practical matter, constrains themselves to the lowest common denominator of systems integrated. For example, if they implemented an 8x rewind functionality but some of the integrated recorders did not support that, they'd either have to disable this when getting video from recorders that did not or have it active but fail to work when used with those cameras. Same issue if some native systems have sophisticated search capabilities or other uncommon features.

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Mark Nay
Oct 12, 2014

Just have the client tune into CBS Sunday nights 10/9C ;-}

The relality is there needs to be a concerted effort in pre-sales engineering [ideally fee-based engagement] to do the discovery of which disparate components are going to be attempted to be integrated together before the grand promise is made "it'll all work seamlessly".

JH
John Honovich
Oct 12, 2014
IPVM

"Do the discovery of which disparate components are going to be attempted to be integrated together before the grand promise is made "it'll all work seamlessly"."

It's very hard to know how well and complete integrations will be before hand because the systems integrated are typically poorly documented with minimal track records of being implemented before hand.

And then you have the PSIM salesperson most likely assuring everyone that it will work.

That said, at some point, the end user needs to share the blame of spending hundreds of thousands without doing due diligence but it is a hard task.

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