Why Did Apple And Google Choose Arecont?

I'd point out as well, that just because you're two of the largest consumer technology names on the planet, doesn't mean you know IP cameras or surveillance in general (although there's probably a lot of knowledge residing in the trenches). Arecont's sales department may not have even come into play - more likely, it's a combination of standard, everyday-type corporate decision makers coupled with an integrator's whiz-bang sales pitch.

Not sure why apple uses Areccont but I was told Apple uses exacq in there AppleStores beccuase they were one of the only companies to have an apple client. At the Apple HQ they use VidSys PSIM to manage all events and video. As for what they use as an underlying VMS and Access control at Apple HQ I am usure.

Having seen a copy of the PO for the cameras that ended up at Google, I can attest the cameras were sold via a national distributor to a large national integrator, Arecont respected the channel. But when you purchase 5000 2MP cameras in a single order, you get a great price. That being said, I am aware of another large tech firm a little north of google and apple that went to Arecont an attempted to purchase directly, Arecont declined but one of their competitors did not. In all three cases mfg personnel maintained relationships with the end users.

It's probably worthwhile to comment on why people would choose Arecont in general. I see 2 general drivers:

• The SurrondVideo multi-imager 180 and 360 cameras (like the 20MP version we tested). It's nearly unique with only a few direct competitors and has a lot of value for people who want to cover large areas at low cost. And now they will soon roll out the Omni, which is an even more novel and distinct offering.
  
• Bare bones, low cost fixed cameras - While Arecont has very few 'bells and whistles' - no SD card support, no analytics, rudimentary software (AV100), most of their cameras are significantly less money than equivalent resolution Axis/Sony/Bosch/Panasonic/Pelco/etc. offerings.
  

What I am curious about is the second driver. In 2010, around the time those companies purchased Arecont, low cost Asian alternatives were scarce. Now, there are many credible alternatives (with Dahua being the hot, up and comer in the US). How much is this impacting Arecont?

Interesting ideas folks. I'm answering from the perspective of a client securing bids on a project roughly 1/3 the size of those two and I find the answer to be a little less technical. Security gets categorically placed into a non-revenue center decision making process. The executive management of these firms does not view security as a profit center, rather a necessary expense to combat intellectual property concerns. Viewing the department as such, decisions will always skew towards cost basis as opposed to long term quality of evidence produced by the investment and long term cost of ownership.

To avoid this, security professionals have to find some form of ROI or ROA metric with which to justify their decision to go with a higher quality product (inferring here that they could in fact do better than Arecont). Example might be shipment verification or package tracking, perhaps even tie in to Kronos for payroll tracking of hourly employees. Profit is a two figure equation, Revenue minus costs. Security cannot generally affect revenue, but often can show cost reduction through the incorporation of security technology into operations and its use as an efficiency tool.

As somone very familiar with all the key decision points by those two companies in selecting Arecont Vision cameras (as well as Microsoft, Facebook, T-Mobile, AT&T and Comcast) there is a major technological factor as to why these companies selected (and continued with) Arecont Vision, that nobody is mentioning here.

Both of the above companies (as well as the others mentioned) went into high gear in their migration to megapixel in mid-2008 or shortly thereafter. In April of 2008 Arecont Vision introduced the first ever full line of H.264 equipped IP cameras across all of their offered resolutions at that time. It's easy to forget the impact that made. For the first time in a long time someone had introduced to the surveillance industry a 10x solution to what was then (and often still is now) the biggest pain in migrating to all megapixel IP. Storage/bandwidth costs! When you are talking about global enterprise scales of 10,000 cameras or more, that is the difference between millions of dollars of storage vs. tens of millions of dollars worth of storage costs.

The above is not the only reason of course. There were certainly key solutions design and sales professionals involved on all the above projects managing the end user themselves as well as their designers, integrators and distributors. But as everyone tends to lean towards Arecont bashing from days of old, I thought it was important to point out the trail they blazed that easily made them worthy of such august technology customers as Google and Apple

I was a decision maker at a company (mentioned above) that went to Arecont around 2008 (along with Exacq). I can tell you that the cost was a major factor, so was the input from our integrator. We did not have the choices available today, nor the knowledge we have today. We were moving from analog to IP, it was all new to us. We liked the H.264 compression, the lenses worked well and there was a full line of options. Integration was simple and the results were great.

We continued to use Arecont based on our experience. Simply put, the images captured were great in comparison to what we were used to with analog cameras and we experienced no failures. I am no longer with said company, but they are still the camera of choice today.

I use Sony at my current employer, but would not be opposed to using Arecont again. With that said, I have not been a fan of their 180 and 360 cameras. Mostly because I use the cams for post incident investigations, so I don't often go for big sweeping areas. I generally focus in ingress and egress in buildings and parking lots.