Cisco Releases New Video Software for IT, Security Partnerships

This Thursday, Cisco announced Video Surveillance Manager 7.0, “the industry’s first solution built from the ground-up and certified to run in Cisco’s virtualized Unified Computing System (UCS) environments,” according to a press release.

These solutions enable security executives in healthcare, public sector and retail to move beyond traditional basic safety and security surveillance deployments to use video to transform how they run their business through hyper-scalability and ease of configuration, the release states.

The announcement also includes a complete new line of medianet-enabled high definition IP video surveillance cameras and remote management services for physical security as well as new advanced services to help IT and security teams partner to implement large-scale video deployments.

Analysts estimate that by 2013, more than 50 percent of all video surveillance deployments will be managed by IT on the IP network in order to support the deluge of bandwidth-heavy video data, the release says. And, as these IT departments are taking charge of so much data – especially video – the ease of migration of video surveillance to IP continues to accelerate, making collaboration between security and IT imperative.

These new technologies, the release states, offer economies of scale to enable video-based innovations with easy implementation. This will give applications of video beyond security, including remote patient monitoring solutions, shrinkage reduction and allowing for urban video protection initiatives.

The Video Surveillance Manager 7.0 supports open cloud-ready Web and IT applications through APIs and SDKs, and it is designed for applications such as video recording and provides streaming support for video-enabled locations such as: customer contact centers, integrated oil and gas applications, inventory and warehouse management operations, among others, the release says.

VSM 7.0 also scales to support up to 100,000 IP video surveillance cameras per Video Surveillance Manager instance, and can manage more than one million video surveillance streams when combined with Cisco Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) applications.

ON DEMAND: Business-impacting events such as severe weather, man-made disasters, and supply chain disruption are increasing in frequency and making impacts around the globe.

In today's rapidly evolving security landscape, organizations face an ever-growing array of disruptive events, security threats and risks. Traditional reactive approaches to security intelligence often leave businesses vulnerable and ill-prepared to anticipate and mitigate emerging threats that could impact the safety of their people, facilities or operations.