Video surveillance equipment manufacturer Pelco clearly seems to believe in the idea that the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. The company has been cutting deals to integrate its equipment with numerous other types of systems and expects to make at least a dozen announcements of those accomplishments this year.

“Video systems, access control and other systems need to work closely together,” noted Terry Carver, API business development manager for Clovis, Calif.-based Pelco, which plans to make announcements involving the integration of its video products to point-of-sale, video analytics, building management, cell phones and other systems.

Facilitating the integration of Pelco’s products with those of other manufacturers is a software development kit that the company developed and makes available at no charge to integration partners. “We actually promoted this and sought partners,” Carver explained. “We were more proactive than reactive.”

Carver has seen particularly strong interest from access control and point-of-sale manufacturers. When Pelco’s video equipment is integrated with access control, he noted, the access control system would receive an alarm if, for example, a door were propped open. “Through our application programming interface, we allow the access control companies to trigger video recording so users can see who badged and propped the door open,” Carver explained.

Point-of-sale systems can be made much more powerful with the integration of video. Traditionally such systems work with cash registers to log transactions by time, date and cashier — and when video is added to the mix, it can help security staff determine if, for example, an item purchased was tagged incorrectly or a cashier made incorrect change.

Among Pelco’s new integration partners are several point-of-sale manufacturers, including Westec Loss Prevention, Aspect Loss Prevention and Appscio, formerly known as Avidence.

Another of Pelco’s new integration partners will compete with companies such as Honeywell Security and Napco Security Group, which offer customers the ability to remotely view video surveillance images of their home or business via their cell phone or wireless personal digital assistant. Unlike those offerings, which are manufacturer-specific, Pelco has partnered with a company that offers a software-based solution that works with several digital video recorders. That company, Qeeps, is based in Thirsk, U.K. but also is targeting the U.S. market.

Integrating its equipment with software from video analytics developers also offers exciting possibilities, Carver said. He noted, for example, that airport security might use video analytics to alert personnel monitoring the system if a person were to walk against the flow of foot traffic or if a suitcase were left unattended.

Pelco is integrating its video surveillance equipment with building automation systems from several manufacturers, including Johnson Controls and TAC. Other types of systems that will be featured in integration announcements from Pelco this year include central station alarm and video monitoring systems and mobile digital video recording systems.