Choosing the right video management system (VMS) goes beyond making a customer happy. When it comes to large-scale deployments, security dealers and integrators can improve security, reliability and scalability by choosing the right enterprise-level VMS for their clients.
To help make this pivotal decision easier, here are five factors we gathered from members of the integration community to consider when selecting a VMS for an enterprise customer.
1. Ease of Use
With enterprise-level deployments that have security departments and experienced operators, ease of use doesn’t just mean “easy to operate.” The definition expands to include UIs that help operators save time, do their jobs more efficiently, and easily train new users.
“I look for VMS that’s intuitive,” remarks Gary Chavarria, general manager of security integration, TRL Systems, Rancho Cucamonga, Calif. “It’s easy to go in and search quickly and efficiently; it leads me down a simple path. I like systems where you don’t need more than two clicks to get any place. Once you have to click more than twice, it’s no longer user friendly.”
Lon Bazelais, president, Grid Squared Systems, Astoria, N.Y., adds that ease of use means not only how easy the system is going to be to operate, but how easy it is to maintain as well. "A system across multiple sites can very easily become unruly and hard to manage,” he explains. He recommends choosing a VMS that an end user can easily operate and manage from both a local operator level and a global operational level.
2. Integration
The ability to integrate with other devices is obviously the foundation of a VMS, and integrators should consider third-party programs for integration as well as the typical intrusion detection and access control systems. “A VMS should be able to integrate into third-party analytics platforms including those that allow for facial recognition,” Chavarria comments.
DJ Adamski, senior electrical engineer, Accurate Controls, Ripon, Wis., notes important factors to consider for camera integration. “The VMS should have a basic ability to stream and record all types of cameras, including fixed, 360-degree cameras with full dewarping capabilities within the software, and bring multi-lens cameras into it as well.”
![security camera](/ext/resources/Issues/2023/March/GettyImages-681776154.jpg)
A VMS should have a basic ability to stream and record all types of cameras, including fixed, 360-deg. cameras and multi-lens models as well. // MOISSEYEV/ISTOCK / GETTY IMAGES PLUS VIA GETTY IMAGES
Integration also means keeping future integration (scalability) in mind. Anticipating what an enterprise will need as their company — and, in turn, their security needs — grows is another important factor in choosing a VMS, Bazelais says.
Chavarria recommends software-based VMS for this reason. “I tell my customers you’re never going to outgrow it,” he remarks. “Additionally, staying with a nonproprietary app allows us a lot of flexibility and lets us focus on the needs of the client both today and what we might see five years from now. We look at where are they at today with technology and where are they going.”
3. Features
Which VMS features are must-haves and which are just bells and whistles? Answering this question should be based on which specific features that the end user requires or will find beneficial, Bazelais explains. “Every VMS does the basics but what separates one platform from another, and what are the costs associated with those features?”
Adamski adds, “Not all economical video management systems can provide every feature that an upscale system can provide. When the [enterprise] owners are looking for a VMS that can do basic functions such as live stream, record, and search on motion, then we can offer huge cost savings over a system that needs perimeter analytics, mobile viewing and advanced search options.”
Aaron Whitaker, owner, Preventia, Columbia, Tenn., agrees. “Camera systems have become about much more than security, so a VMS needs to offer more,” he says. “The actual features or capabilities of the VMS and how our clients will be able to benefit from them makes a big difference. We want to make sure they are competitive with other offerings and solve problems for clients.”
4. Performance
VMS manufacturers strive to make their VMS reliable (see sidebar) because integrators know that a VMS is nothing if it can’t be depended upon. Whitaker states, “Performance, for us, is all about reliability and uptime. We prefer cloud VMS solutions, and it is critical that every time a customer needs to use it, it works.”
Chavarria’s perspective is that “An enterprise solution has to work seamlessly across an entire WAN. A lot of that is predicated on the strength of the network, but on the video management platform side it has to have the horsepower to be able to take in a tremendous amount of information and utilize one enterprise master server, as well as compute and send the information out to other regions.”
He also notes that a VMS needs to have the ability to be redundant and, if necessary, use failover technology as well.
Adamski concurs. “Because many of our systems have multiple servers in multiple equipment rooms, as a company we like to make sure each system has some type of failover so that when the system has issues, it can recover and maintain its basic ability to live stream and record video.”
5. Total Cost of Ownership
When determining total cost of ownership to an enterprise customer seeking a VMS, integrators should make calculations beyond the price tag.
Whitaker explains, “It’s not about the lowest price, it’s about the best value for the client. Flexibility in pricing is very beneficial to make sure you can adapt to different clients as well. We’ve actually passed on a lot of VMS solutions that have been offered to us at a lower price point because the features and overall value didn’t match.”
Among cyber-hardening feature sets, a VMS should provide end-to-end protection of video, data and communications with at-rest and in-transit encryption. // IMAGE COURTESY OF ACCURATE CONTROLS
Adamski contributes additional elements that go into this equation. “How much is the upfront pricing versus the SMA [separately managed account] fee or subscription fees?” he asks. “A lot of facilities we install in remember the days of DVRs where you purchase the equipment and only replace it once the unit has failed. Numerous facilities are unprepared for ongoing maintenance of hardware such as switches, hard drives and servers and have to [later] budget for replacements. Several video management systems require a service maintenance agreement to receive software upgrades in addition to support for the vendor/installer, while other video management systems do not require this to receive the same support.”
Selecting the right VMS for a large-scale security application entails envisioning what the client and the system will look like in the future and which attributes the client will find most valuable in the present. A thoughtful analysis that determines dependability of system performance, future-proof and integration capabilities, and long-term cost breakdown will set integrators up for success with enterprise clients.