Rodney, I'd like to address your concerns in two manners. First, I'd like to note that we don't believe in “spamming”. Somewhere from a trade show, personal contact, or previous communication, we (as a company) must have been in touch. We do not buy lists, and we use Constant Contact, which from my research has some fairly strong spam controls. If you feel you've been spammed, you can certainly unsubscribe, and the service automatically would remove you. In this case, I've already instructed our marketing personnel to remove you from the list; however, I will reach out to you in the near future to both confirm your satisfaction with our email policies as well as to introduce you to our company and offer some visibility on how we determine a factual claim of 100,000 deployments.
Keep in mind ISS is over 15 years in business. It took us time to get to this number that admittedly, we are quite proud of.
Our COO, Aluisio Figueiredo addressed John almost immediately after receiving his email. We take John's requests and insight of the industry very seriously and it was a priority to address his (and your) concern. I’m sure John already sent you the email from Aluisio (which we deem public and could be forwarded) or may have sent you some of the key points. To summarize:
- The 100,000 deployment number is about 2 years old and has since increased.
- The number is based on key files generated per unique solution. We call each of these a deployment. In some cases they could be a 4 camera system on one server, on others it can be an enterprise solution with multiple servers, as in or 5000 camera, 106 server deployment in Latin America, or our 1300 camera, 40 server deployment in New Jersey. Each counts as one deployment.
- So the actual number of servers running ISS will likely be higher.
- If a project increases, and we issue a new key file, that does not increase our “number of deployments” count, as we amend the key and don't generate a new one.
- We also do count our OEM and private labeled sales, including those with a global technology provider based in EMEA with a US headquarters. This particular company uses our software, but with their branding.
Although a competitor, I also believe Milestone’s claim of “over 100,000 installations” worldwide. Both companies are recognized by IMS Research in the Top 10 in VMS worldwide. And Matt to address your concerns, no, we do not ship a single license with any camera manufacturer, so we do not artificially pad our number in that manner.
If anyone has further questions, I and Aluisio, are certainly welcome to discuss this and be more transparent than most VMS providers are on issues such as this. We remain one of the few independent VMS providers remaining, and we value our integrity and our commercial capabilities as highly as our technology offerings. I’m not sure if IPVM allows us to put our contact information in a thread, but we’re certainly very open to Mr. Honovich forwarding our contacts to any interested (or concerned) parties.
Suranjan Ray, VP of Strategic Allicances, ISS