Does Geovision Compare With Milestone?

What do you want to do? Besides multicasting.

What cameras do you plan to use? How many of them? What features? How important is price?

Hi John.

I hope you are well.

My company just won an RFP, a fellow competitor. Wrote a letter to the client trying to imply that their solution was enough, in my opinion it was not. They proposed a Geovision VMS that received and record up to 128 channels. What would be the implications of that type of solution vs Milestone Xprotect Corporate?

It is for a monitoring station that will have 11 operator stations. For this initial phase it is required to provide 200 cameras at 1.3 MP minimum resolution on recording at 15 FPS. the project should be much bigger because the client asked to have the servers dimmensioned for 40 cameras each for a total of 5 servers + 1 failover.

thanks for asking and for the valuable opinion.

Best Regards.

If you are trying to dislodge the bid winner I would start with what is important to the customer in the feature set.

Brand A has 10,000 features, Brand B has 20. Brand B might be a better solution because 19 of the 20 are necessary features and Brand A only has 2 of them. The other 9,998 are cool but not needed.

Is LDAP or Active Directory integration required? Do they both have that? I've been on VMS sales where that one feature was the deciding factor to the IT guys who had the money. Will they actually implement multi-cast? Do they have the necessary switches or was that tossed in to try and separate products, but price won?

Maybe for what the customer expects the Geovision is not an equal but meets the needs. All this to say "look for what the customer needs and not what they want.

Undisclosed. There's not enough info to really make a complete statement but if you had to guess just how many "unlimited" might be bought. i don't proclaim to know Geovision or support it so my comments are generic in nature. I have won projects over alternates with the smallest and narrowest of interpretations because the others didn't meet the spec literally. The customer wanted my solution. I have lost projects in the same way because they wanted someone else's solution. This customer might understand that the VMS will meet the current needs and be willing to toss it out when they really know where the scope will be. You have a few options. You can find out if Geovision doesn't meet their needs and hopefully get in front of the right person on time, or you can try to get the award tossed with a lawyer. (Possibly). The second one doesn't make friends except for the lawyer.

Is this a public bid? Can you review your competitors quotation?

Also, what other product did you use on this bid in regards to cameras and switches? While Geovision cameras are not priced down at the level of Hikvision or Dahua, their VMS licenses are free if your competitor used Geovision cameras. If that is the case, I would suspect that your competitor is winning solely on price. People are willing to compromise a lot on their spec if it saves them 25%.

As an integrator that installs quite a bit of GeoVision, I'm well aware of its strengths and its weaknesses. Putting 128 cameras on one server is just plain dumb. While the Geovision spec says they can do it, follow the instructions on how it is done. Multiple NIC cards, multiple networks, many hard drives. All good design - but why would you put all of that in one box? With the relative costs of processors and power supplies, the original spec of 40 cameras on 5 servers makes a much more stable/reliable platform. Geo has many modules that can do specific jobs. System integrity monitoring / backup / system management / live viewing only / investigation only / etc. Unlimited expansion is very doable - the platform expands nicely. With the base software “free” when using their cameras, it’s pretty hard to beat.

Back to the customer spec/wants/needs. How reliable does this system need to be? 11 operators - all the time? All looking at the same views? Wide area network? All fiber? I agree there is much more to it than the simple choice of hardware.

Geo has many huge sites around the world, it can be done, when done properly. BUT, has the Geo integrator ever done a job as proposed? Does it work? Is he a respected competitor in the market?