Intellex - American Dynamics Video Surveillance Examined
American Dynamics, through its Intellex product line, has been one of the largest and most prominent 'enterprise' DVR providers in the last decade. They easily have hundreds of thousands of DVRs deployed [link no longer available] in many high end retailers, banks, corporations and governments.
Over the last few years, American Dynamics has been a favorite target of new entrance IP video companies. While Intellex DVRs are fairly expensive, they lack IP camera support and do not offer software only.
Recently, American Dynamics made two acquisitions to rectify such limitations. They acquired Trident Tek [link no longer available] to enhance their IP/software only offering and Intellivid [link no longer available] for high end video analytics.
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Intellex DVR: this is their traditional DVR product offering and represents almost all American Dynamic deployments. Intellex DVRs offer a number of series including Intellex Ultra (their high end /high resolution offering), Intellex DVMS (their mid-level offering) and Intellex LT (lower end offering). None of these products support IP cameras. Only the Intellex IP supports IP cameras. All of these products can be managed from a single user client - Network Client.
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Video Edge/Trident Tek: This comes from their 2008 acquistion of Trident Tek and is a mainstream IP video surveillance software offering. American Dynamics offers this both as software only and as NVR appliances. Analog cameras must be connected to external encoders (i.e., this product is not a hybrid DVR with direct analog inputs).
- Intellivid: Another 2008 acquisition, Intellivid is their video analytics offering (optimized for retail). Intellivid records and analyzes video from IP video feeds. It does not accept direct analog connection.
American Dynamics is in the process of merging these product offerings into a single coherent product family. Currently, each of these products requires a separate client to view and manage video. On their committed roadmap is a universal client that could access video from any of these platforms. American Dynamics does not have any committed plans to add IP camera support to existing Intellex DVMS or Intellex Ultra DVRs.
Strengths
- Extensive support by third party access control systems
- Offers some third party storage support
Weaknesses
- Existing users of Intellex cannot add IP cameras to their DVRs; requires adding in new NVRs to add IP cameras
- Pricing is high relative to other DVRs with similar functionalities
- Software only offering cannot be viewed and managed from the same client as the DVRs