Onssi National Sales Manager Goes To Startup
OnSSI's most public figure and company presenter, Brad Anderson, National Sales Manager, has left OnSSI to become VP of Sales at a startup, Elerts.
This follows a few months after Ken LaMarca, hired in 2013 to run OnSSI's marketing, was promoted to run sales as well.
Anderson was well liked and an enthusiastic promoter of OnSSI, so it is a loss for them.
However, it is a get for Elerts, a security startup that is trying to gain traction with a mobile alerting application.
Elert's basic idea is that people in duress can trigger alerts on their phones, have that forwarded out with their location to speed up response. There is a video surveillance / VMS tie-in, whereby the GPS location can be mapped / associated with cameras.
Here's Elert's marketing video that roughly shows the concept:
This is actually a good time for startups to attract established senior sales people as there is not a lot of innovation / disruption in the industry, making it harder for sales people to break through to become executives.
As for OnSSI, it will be interesting to see, as this continues the changing of the guard at the VMS company who faces increased competition from 'ingredient' OEM partner Milestone and others.
Brad has certainly been a highly visible part of OnSSI. Will be interesting to see how their demos are handled at ASIS. Brad seemed to have the ability to do demos all day long.
Funny, an integrator and I were discussing who's going to handle the Shamwow-style presentations, now. I'm not sure who else had the personality for that.
04/27/14 05:37pm
Dvtel does this already in their Latitude VMS >> see Tru-Witness >>
David, does what? What elerts does?
They are both apps but they are designed / positioned differently.
elerts is targeted to a broader general population that wants to trigger an alert in an emergency.
Tru-Witness is targeted at guards / security personal who want to share video back to a VMS of an incident.
I am not saying one is better than the other, they are actually more complimenteray than competitive.
| 04/27/14 07:19pm
I get it. Elert to TruWitness - two different things but one is offered as a more agnostic approach to alerting via Smartphone. There are other products out there as well such as Guardly (who OEM's their app to CodeBlue) and Tapshield.
Elerts gives more information to the local AHJ for first response over a typical call to 911 its a picture/video, geoData which is already much more information than a phone call...then integrated to a VMS.
Tru-Witness is more of a proprietary system for DVTEL but performs similarly.
Disclosure: I am CEO of ELERTS. We are very excited to have Brad on our team.
Clarification: ELERTS Attention Engine is similar in purpose to video analytics, but instead of using software algorithms to detect suspicious/deviant behavior, ELERTS uses Human Analytics, i.e., a person with a smartphone senses something is out of place and reports it.
For example, a person with an iPhone or android phone uses an ELERTS app to report a security or safety concern, like an abandoned backpack. The report includes the GPS LAT/LON location of the phone and is sent to ELERTS Cloud.
Next, ELERTS Attention Engine correlates that LAT/LON with a database of camera FoV to determine which surveillance camera is nearby the person in distress. A command is sent to the VMS ("display camera #93 on the big screen") to focus the Security Operator's attention on that camera. PTZ cams may be commanded to swivel and point toward the action.
ELERTS Attention Engine is integrated with major VMS and works with any number of cameras. It solves the problem of finding the needle in the haystack, identifying which camera is pointed toward a crime, so incident can be viewed in real-time.
During setup, the Field of View is mapped for every camera on a campus. These FoV polygons are stored in the ELERTS cloud. Knowing where each camara can "see", ELERTS Attention Engine can quickly determine which camera is nearby a smartphone-reported incident.
| 04/27/14 10:10pm
Ed,
Beyond the see something/say something capabilities, your passive 'distress' signaling program is also something I'm pretty sure Tru-Witness does not have, no?
Brad does a mean demo of this feature at security shows; I figure that's why you stole him from us... :)
Hi Marty,
Yes, that is true. ELERTS apps have a personal safety feature called EscortMe, which Brad often demonstrated as only Brad can, at trade shows. As they walk to a destination, such as across campus, a person being threatened can pull the headphones from their phone to trigger a distress alert to the security office. Their name, phone # and location are displayed, while ELERTS Attention Engine triggers the VMS, like Ocularis, to focus on the nearest camera.
OnSSI is a great company with innovative products and a great team. I sincerely hope we remain strong partners.
Best regards,
Ed
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