Subscriber Discussion
Why Did Apple And Google Choose Arecont?
Two month ago, I went to Silicon Valley for a conference. The conference was only 2 days long so I stayed for an additional 5 days to look at the city and to visit some techie sites. Being a huge geek myself, I contacted some friends in apple and google so that I can spend a day with them.
Both site where amazing. Both are them are so different but very interesting as well. One thing that I noticed that both shared in common is that both companies chose Arecont for all of their new cameras. The cameras seemed to have gotten upgraded not long ago. Both apple and google are known for being innovative. They facilities have the best of the best. I was drooling the entire time. Eitherway, I am wondering, from all the manufacturers, why Arecont? Why both of the two technology giants would choose Arecont? Is it because its an American made product? Is it because they think it fits better to what they do as a company? Unfortunaltey, both companies did not share any information about their VMS.
Any thoughts?
It may have helped Arecont is one of the bigger players based on California. It may have also have helped Arecont seems to have a lot of sales and promotion people vs quality control people.
"Arecont seems to have a lot of sales and promotion people vs quality control people."
Ouch.
Lest this turn into a speculation and bashing, it would be useful if someone with inside knowledge commented on this.
Jose, did you notice any particular Arecont models Apple and Google were using?
John, your right. They have a lot of new products out and everyone deserves a second chance. And it would be interesting to know how the decision process worked out. If you could delete my comment, that would be good.
| 09/26/13 06:36pm
I'm 99% sure they use the same integrator, and I know that integrator is a fan of Arecont. So it's like that Arecont was on a short-list of recommended products for them. Additionally, with Arecont being a US company and based essentially "locally" most likely helped. Then, you look at their cost-per-pixel and form factor options, and I'm not surprised to see they have lots of cameras in these places.
You can argue about applicability or quality or whatever, but if you want to know why Arecont managed to sell a lot of cameras to these places, and you think about it from a "sales" angle, and I think you can see it was probably a relatively easy sale for them.
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.
I have no knowledge of why either choose Arecont, however I would say typically what is in stalled is what is recommended by the chosen integrator. There are lots of products out there and end users can't test or even get knowledge of every product out there.
For example two years ago we started putting in a new ATM model that was specifically designed to be an ADA compliant model. However after design the manufacture of the ATM realized they did not keep an ATM face camera mounting location in mind when they designed the unit. So as an after thought they choose a spot that was terrible, with limited space on the inside and the only cameras that would fit were board cameras. The mounting location was so low that unless you were a child, in a wheel chair or a short person (little person), the camera would film your waste. So they decided to fix the problem by making the problem even worse by changing the clear plastic lenses with a fish eye piece. Short of a board camera I have only found one camera that will fit and even then the picture still stinks. This non board camera I never heard of before. But my integrator researched for months and came back to me with hey use this camera. the manufacture even has a model number that incorporates the name of this ATM. This specific camera has been factory focused for this ATM. So I bought two one with factory focusing and one without. The only difference I saw was in price. The factory focusing was a little more expensive. But still required lots of on site adjustments to maximize the terrible picture for a slightly better than terrible picture.
Again I think they probable did little to choose who they used other than to pick an integrator and this integrator specified Arecont.
As far as U.S. made. I would bet this played little into the decision. Look at all of Apples products. They are not made in the U.S. If they cared about made in the U.S. they would make their products here.
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?
I can say that Arecont was involved deeply with both those companies directly alongside the integrators to secure those projects. as well their quality, service and support programs have improved dramatically in the last year and I can say with confidence that their past issues are now just that. In the end everyone has issues with their products, no one is immune, it matters more how they address the core problem then come of that a better company. Arecont Vision has done that.
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
It's probably because someone on the Advisory Board of Arecont recommended them to some senior folks in Apple and Google. It's probably a case of top down selling, nothing more.
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.
Google VMS = DVTel
10/03/13 02:47pm
At ASIS we were told by a rep there that their MicroDome line was designed for Google specifically. Don't know if that is true or not, but that was their sales pitch.
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