odd strategical move if you ask me. Why not just OEM direct from another manufacturer? Who knows.
Unisight Company Profile
Hikvision's largest US OEM, LTS has started to carry Unisight, whose products (shown below) look a lot like Hikvision's rival Dahua:
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I don't buy from LTS, but I am part of their email blast. For anyone who has been getting LTS email marketing blasts, we can all agree that LTS has also been focusing in other area of security market. They are official distributor of NAPCO, and ASSA ABLOY. I'm sure their main business is still video surveillance but focusing on other product mix is a good move in my opinion. All companies must adapt and evolve/change. And who knows? Maybe in 10 years, LTS might become a legitimate security equipment distributor, not just a video surveillance distributor like ADI, Anixter, AlarMax, SES, Systems Depot, Sylmar, and etc... They already have locations in key cities in the US.
Can anyone confirm if this statement is true? My industry peer once told me that "Most of LTS location is independently owned." Then, they are not a chain but a franchise? LTS is just a mass buying group, who contributes to same marketing and maybe use same POS/CRM for transactions, but independently owned.
I did a business search in California Secretary of State, and can only find 1 entity under LT Security Inc., filed back in 2008. So they are celebrating their 10 years in business already.
If anyone has any insights to this, I'm interested, just curious.
I've heard from sources close to the company that the different branches compete against each other. This may give the impression that each location is independently owned but everything I have seen points to the locations being centrally owned.
The central ownership can be confirmed within the company structure. However, even in companies like that, there is some competition between branches. Each branch manager has some level of autonomy to try to outperform the other branches. It's all about results.
Ive always thought that Hikvision's brother owned them. But now that they brought on UnihuaSight, that wipes that theory out of the picture.
Well, I don't see how you could have speculated that. LT had history as a computer equipment distributor before transitioning entirely to security and surveillance. It's where they learned their margins from after all.
This is their old entity: https://www.bloomberg.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=4752703
It's hysterical that they describe their products as "Bleeding Edge" which has been used to describe new technology that is unproven and possibly unstable or unreliable.
The few Unisight "servers" that i've worked on.. that's accurate. My service manager used to call them all kinds of colorful things. BNC rail on a custom winXP embedded box. Terrible client interface that required a Precision workstation to run smoothly, allowed adding of IP cameras, as onvif (no direct support) kind of, when it felt like it.
We have been buying Dahua through Unisight for about a year and a half have thus far just considered them a white-label Dahua reseller. We even use Dahua model numbers when telling our rep what we want. Our first shipments were all white label with no branding on the camera or in the interface (but clearly a Dahaua interface with the Dahua naming removed, and you can download and drop stock Dahua firmware on them). Our more recent shipments have been white label on the physical cameras but use Unisight branding in the web interface. They do push their VMS and I did a web demo just to see. It looked mid-range and more modular than most, but we have been using Video Insight for years now and Unisight's product did not look so compelling that we would want to switch. It is cheaper than Video Insight, which is in turn cheaper than Milestone, Genetec, etc. They did talk about their willingness to add features on demand, and I gather the programming is done primarily in China with a few US-based testers and project managers. We feel we have a solid relationship with Unisight and they are currently our primary Dahua vendor.
I have met some of their US-based staff, and there are plenty of employees with excellent English skills, so I am not sure why they continue to use such "English is not my first language" wording in their marketing.
Could they have tried harder to find a creepy robot voice for their video?
When i inquired about the potential ban of Dahua/Hik and oem...
"EmPower line of the products are not an OEM but an ODM, we have developed our own firmware to support our own VMS professional version. So EmPower line of the hardware will connect with our own EmPower protocol hardware (the hardware manufactories we chose to factory our products are among several different manufactories, not limited to Dahua and Hikvision), and will support Dahua or Hikvision products as third party products on ONVIF protocol, not their own protocol. Unisight is US based company and the firmware was developed in US, the National Defense Authorization Act which released this month will NOT effect this product line for the government use."
not an OEM but an ODM, we have developed our own firmware
In general, those claims are false as it is costly to develop one's own firmware 'from scratch'. It's not rocket science but it's generally more complex and costly than most are willing to do, especially with 11 employees, as Unisight lists on LinkedIn.
As for their supplier, shipping records show a mix of Dahua and 'Saitell':