US Government Entities Hard Spec Hikvision

Hard specifying products can be justified when the buyer needs a very specific feature or function.

Aren't they also justifiable when they are specified because the entity has standardized on a single vendor to ensure homogeneity and increase interoperability and reduce related support issues?

Unless I am missing something, this is not the US Federal Government requesting these but a small municipal government in Pennsylvania.

It feels like these Hikvision articles are more for fear mongering than meaningful conversation at this point.

[I work in an environment that due to security concerns will never install Hik products, but do have them at my personal residence]

Good article, thanks, Brian.

This inspired me to spend a significant amount of time searching Federal Business Opportunities at FBO.gov for any solicitations from any agency, for any location, and any classification, over the past 365 days (the maximum history accessible to search), related to video surveillance and security cameras.

When restricting Google search to site:fbo.gov, Google tells us that "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt"

Since FBO is inaccessible to Google, you're at the mercy of Federal excellence in software, which as multiple recent events have demonstrated, provides a consistently superior user interface for absolutely superb federal transparency.

I searched for a variety of Hikvision models from the IPVM camera finder, across a range of resolutions, prices, and functions, without discovering a single federal solicitation over the past year that specified the Hikvision brand or Hikvision models, even by example.

More broadly, although searching the FBO.gov archive with keywords "security camera" and "video surveillance" turned up only a limited number of solicitations, some of those called out specific models (or equivalent), typically associated with very specific needs or else with compatibility when replacing inoperative cameras or expanding systems. Just by way of example,

M00263-16-T-1014 requested Pelco Spectra IV SE and Pelco FD5-DV10-6 or equivalent.

N6893613F0107 requested FieldPro 5X MWIR cameras

P15PS02002a requested Avigilon 2.0-H3-B1, Avigilon ES-HD-HWS-SM, Avigilon 3.0W-H3-DO2, etc.

From this, I conclude that particular vendors and models (or equivalent) are being specified in federal solicitations. While it's difficult to prove a negative, the fact that a reasonable search fails to turn up federal solicitations for Hikvision brand or models suggests that such federal activity is, at most, uncommon.

The challenges experienced while researching this post may have turned up a whole new topic: searches for video surveillance exposed less than 100 results across the entire federal solicitation base for the past year, yet it seems reasonable that there must have been at least several thousand video surveillance procurements across the federal infrastructure in that timeframe. Perhaps there's an art to pulling relevant information from FBO.gov. In some cases, it seemed as if FBO.gov was pushing information seekers to non-government web sites that appeared to be less accessible and transparent, placing some of the solicitation information behind a registration wall (perhaps this is only the case for solicitations which are no longer open?). Certainly there has been a deliberate choice to prevent the kind of transparency that Google indexing can provide.

From my poor search results, I suspect that businesses which understand how to discover opportunities within FBO have a very significant selective advantage in accessing the federal marketplace. With its video surveillance focus, who knows -- there might be the basis of an IPVM article here...

Here's a bid for a school in India that was pre-loaded for Hik, but done a bit too obviously to get away with.

Couple of quotes:

Seem the specs has been copied from HIKVISION its their nomenclature. Request to please make it generalized for all.

Generally Bosch/Pelco/Sony cannot compete with Hikvision in term of technology & costing. Request you to keep same range of make or add equivalent brand of Dahua or CP Plus which are equivalent with Hikvision

Out of the 4 brands mentioned only Hikvision has 256 channel NVR. Therefore requesting you to add CP Plus and Dahua brand so that there is fare competition

The technical specification of all CCTV products in the tender seem to be inclined towards a particular OEM – “Hikvision”. Therefore, request you to please make general technical specification of CCTV products to give equal opportunity to all. Also as per CVC guidelines, Point no. 8.3 – “Unduly restrictive criteria, creating entry barrier for potential bidders” is restricted.

Central vigilance commission guidelines for public Procurement. It is mentioned in the check list that “Whether there is any deliberate attempt to make the pre- qualification criteria suiting to particular bidder(s)”

So John, when will this appear in the local news paper's investigative reporting section... or better yet, tweeted to Trump... could be the Chinese will supply us with ample "Fireworks" for the 4th in the form of headlines if this hits Fox news...

It's not unusual for city and state government to buy cheap anything.

You will not see DOD buying Hikvision. China is not a favored country and will never be one as long as it is ruled by Communism. So until something freezes over.

I don't think anyone gave the end user info on Hikvision background and I doubt if the decision maker has the intelligence to check anything out besides pricing.

We just bid on 3 major opportunities and in all cases, customer excluded any company that has product made in China. This also excluded Panasonic's new low end line.

This was after they were given verbal info we shared from IPVM.

Have to give IPVM credit. I may not always agree with IPVM but I like their words when it comes to US protection.