Dear fellow members,
Being a man guarding company on one of the islands in the Caribbean for many years, we are now moving forward by offering more complete solutions, in which cameras are off course a major part. As we are staring up we face all kinds of challenges in which searching the IPVM forum and the Summer Cam Course helps a lot.
The challenge I want to reach out for is choosing the right VMS. For our fist few sites we are now installing mainly HIKvision due to expected value for money. Now we are experimenting with iVMS4200 (and 4500 for the apps). I have looked into the option of upgrading to iVMS5400 which seems to have some interesting options, but limits the max cams to around 250 if I'm not mistaken. Currently we have to manage around 50 but I expect to go into hundreds soon. Costs for licence are one time 5500 dollar or so.
I have read the best and worst VMS of 2016 post and visited some of those websites, but then still making the right choice is not easy.
Can you please help me from your experience and via discussion, taking into account our current starting situation (in which investments and system needs to grow along time). Our main focus points are:
- Viewing and responding to alerts from IP (and some current turbo HD) cameras of 1 or multiple brands using line crossing, intrusion and other analytics
- Managing multiple client accounts (and their cameras) from the monitoring center, up to a couple of 100 cameras
- Involving two way audio as intervention option
- Report writing to clients (incidents and regular basis)
- Not focused on active viewing of all cameras, but mainly responding to alerts that pop up
Much appreciated, I look forward to your advice and tips.
Cheers,
Serge.