Other Than Sureview, Are There Any Other Options For Remote Video Monitoring?

IPConfigure's Orchid VMS Cloud Service

My recommendation is that you dip a toe in first by offering this service to your customers using a 3rd party monitoring company who provides the remote monitoring.  This will give you time to learn whats needed in order to deploy your in-house operation properly and smoothly. It will be transparent to your customers, you'll market & brand it under your name and if you choose the right monitoring center partner the customer won't know its not your in house people doing it unless you tell them (that's an ethical question you'll have to decide).

I've talked to a lot of guard companies who had the same thought you're having and I love that your industry is finally braving the technology world (5 yrs ago I couldn't get most of them to even have an 80ft conversation about it).  Frankly, what I learned from my interface with the guard company community is that most of them are no where near close to knowledgeable enough about networking, bandwidth considerations, detection analytics programming etc. and will just get themselves mired in mud jumping right in.  The danger is that they (you) don't know what you don't know and I promise you its a heck of a lot more than you imagine.

Why do I know this?  Because I wanted them to build out a monitoring center in their offices and I was going to provide them the cameras in the field and I, like them, thought it would be a walk in the park.  When I couldn't get them to talk about it, I decided to do it myself and thankfully I used a 3rd party monitoring company.  Not because that was the "dip your toe in" right thing to do but because it was the least costly way for me to get my cameras out there and start getting RMR rolling.  So for me it was dumb luck. As it turned out, I learned SOOOOOOOOOOO much in the process and even with 3rd party it was painful, that I now feel qualified to give my recommendation on the subject.  Been there, done that, and thankful the Universe interceded and prevented me from trying to jump right in where I'm certain I would have lost my butt.  The things I learned that I didn't know I didn't know would have killed my business immediately had I run into them on my own.

In answer to the question:  Yes, there are many more options other than Sureview and you should explore them ALL before making an investment and more importantly before trying to implement it on your current customers.  The last thing in the world you need is to implement it badly and lose customers over it.   A lot of vendors offering central station monitoring software will try to sell you on jumping in but be very careful because that's probably a salesperson your talking to and once he books the business and turns you over to tech support you're really on your own.  There are all kinds of gotcha's having nothing to do with the software that isn't your software companies job to warn you about so you'll find out when you run into a customer who doesn't have an "IT Dept" and expects you to be it and then you find out that the switch they use won't work or the cameras are alarming out of control and now you have to be the camera expert etc.  

A good 3rd party monitoring company can help walk you through a lot of that so you can learn of the pitfalls and deploy a few customers with that 3rd party safety net before you go all out.

Full disclosure:  we've been in business now using a 3rd party provider (Eyeforce) for 5 years.  You'd have to ask them directly what central station software they use but I believe they've been happy with it and from my end, we've had no problems.  

I'm happy to talk to you or your customer directly and share my experiences if that will help.  www.focalpointsecurityaz.com