Schneider Goes VSaaS

Published Apr 24, 2012 00:00 AM
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Schneider Electric, the parent company of major surveillance manufacturer, Pelco, announced a partnership agreement to distribute VSaaS from OzVision. Many wondered, including us, if this was Pelco's move into VSaaS, one of the most ballyhooed segments of the industry. In this note, we examine the agreement, the impact on Schneider, the relationship with Pelco and the strength of OzVision.

Key Details

Here are key details behind the partnership:

  • This has nothing to do with Pelco. Pelco is not OEMing nor re-selling OzVision.
  • Schneider Electric has branches that do system integration. These branches are carrying OzVision VSaaS.

Schneider Branches

While not well known, Schneider has a handful of system integration around the world. Most of them are in the US, with a total of 16 there. According to Schneider, these branches predominantly integrate building management systems in addition to security integration projects.

As part of their security integration program, the branches will offer OzVision, targeting small camera count applications. Schneider offers 3 service levels connecting analog cameras to the cloud via OzVision encoders: 4-channel 128 Kbps (CIF), 4-channel 256 Kbps (CIF) and 2-channel 256 Kbps (4CIF).

Schneider says that the integration branches are separate from Pelco and only represent a small fraction of Pelco's overall business.

OzVision

OzVision's key differentiators are support for multi-channel analog encoders and video verification. Among non Axis VSaaS providers, this is relatively uncommon. With two and four channel encoder options [link no longer available] that connect to the cloud, OzVision provides a path for small analog systems to be sent to the cloud. Video verification feature is useful for remote alarm monitoring.

We tested the OzVision offering and were overall not impressed. Like most VSaaS offerings, pricing was unattactive. Worse, video quality was poor (even for analog). While OzVision brags about 'ultra-low bandwidth' they accomplish this by lowering the quality / compression level of the video.

Conclusion

This is likely to be a modest, tactical offering for Schneider branches but does not represent a major shift or move. Eventually, we expect Pelco to release its own offering. That will be much more interesting to see.