Sorry if this is a stupid question. Why would a municipality go out for bid for a Street Surveillance system when they already own Cisco Video Surveillance Platform and Stream Manager software? Why not just use what they have in place? They also have in place a Cisco Aironet wireless mesh network. I am not terribly familiar with Cisco Video Surveillance products (I have heard some bad and some good), but can it be THAT bad that they would drop it in favor of something else?
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Why Is This Municipality Dropping Cisco Video Surveillance?
JH
John Honovich
Jan 07, 2015Do you know what version of Cisco they have? Is it a 1 year old, 5 years old? There's a lot of horror stories floating around about the older VMS. Indeed, Cisco did a whole re-write not too long ago - Cisco Reboots Video Surveillance
Mark Jones
Jan 07, 2015I don't John. I have the time to find out before the bid though. I am guessing, but I am pretty confident it is older than 2 years. I have heard many of those same horror stories.
CC
Carla Calk
Jan 11, 2015My guys learned the Cisco VMS and said that it is the worst they have seen. They have been doing Surveillance for 10+ years. Cisco has alot to do to get it even somewhat ready for me personally to even state that we are familiar with it. We stay as far away from it as possible.
SP
Sean Patton
Jan 11, 2015I went to Cisco VMS training just prior to some of the later versions (7?) being released... I also helped replace a Cisco VMS system at The State University of NY Oswego which was an absolute trainwreck for the couple years it was in place. The security department has been thrilled to have a system that actually records, streams and cameras don't drop offline on a daily/weekly basis. I would say 70% of the training I went to (at Cisco's VMS dev HQ) was spent explaining everything that didn't work.
DG
Dick Green
Jan 11, 2015Mark, I am in the process of replacing a Cisco system in a School District now. One of several, I have done with Exacq. We will probably re-image the Cisco servers and replace the VMS so they will not have to totally scrap their investment. Obviously for School Districts to make that type of investment again after only a couple of years speaks volumes.
RF
Robert Fuller
Jan 12, 2015What kind of servers are they? I would check that. We ran Cisco VMS up until 6.1.3 and it was an absolute wreck. When we went to replace we couldnt use the Cisco servers as they were Linux based and didnt have the capablitilies to run Windows Server effectively.
DG
Dick Green
Jan 12, 2015Robert, since my integrator partner is handling the install, I would have to check with him on the type of OS the servers are running. However, Exacq offers both Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows OS server software versions, so it shouldn't be an issue. Thanks for the reply.
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