At BCD Video, Northbrook, Ill., Jeff Burgess, president, and Tom Larson, director of global accounts, represent the business model that makes this company unique: the successful blend of IP and IT. A core competency in both of these areas allows the company to work with systems integrators in building storage solutions for their projects.

Burgess has an extensive background in the IT industry, founding the company in 1999 to provide IT services to Fortune 500 companies. The company began to evolve in 2008, when Larson came onboard with years of experience working with IP video.

“The company was dabbling in the video market building servers in 2002,” Larson related. “We saw a need for an IT company to be servicing video integrators and keep their interests in mind. Everything is always changing so fast in the IT world. It can be difficult for integrators to keep up with that. We are a partner they can rely on and keep them going in the right direction.”

BCDVideo works primarily through two important partnerships: with server manufacturer HP, as one of its global OEM partners, and with Anixter, as their solution distributor.  A strong relationship with both of these companies allows for a complete IP video solution delivered to customers, and providing the necessary expertise at all levels — inside the hardware and in the design and installation of the video storage solution. 

“We work directly with the integrator to engineer their storage requirements for each project,” Burgess explained. “When we pre-calculate the necessary storage for any project, we guarantee the results. If we spec out a 48TB server storage solution and it gets on site and we’re six terabytes short for what the project needed, we would cover the missing six terabytes. Happily, we have never had to do that. Of course, it’s not only the storage amount, but the correct storage, dependent on the VMS being used as well as a number of other parameters. Not all 12TB IP video servers are the same. By having Video System Architects (VSA’s) on staff, we have the configuration experts finding the right solution before a quote is sent to a customer. Of course, we still adhere to our thirty-minute quote turnaround times."

Larson added, “Thanks to both Anixter’s technology lab and the depth of Anixter’s customer relationships, we get to work closely with the engineering teams of such large national integrators as ADT Siemens, and SimplexGrinnell.  Yet at the same time — again through Anixter  — we also work just as closely with independent integrators of every size. Anybody who is doing IP-based video surveillance is our joint target. Our existing installations vary from customers ranging from a $5 million integrator with half a dozen employees that purchases half a million dollars in servers a year to those at the top of the SDM 100. We have projects that have only four cameras and a small HP tower server for a retail-type installs all the way up to a large arena, where we had 1,900 megapixel cameras on site. Being able to service  any size project with a complete HP–branded solution, including the workstations, switches, servers, and storage, gives the integrator an edge, and lets the end-user sleep better at night.”

BCD is very technology focused, using 6GIG SAS server technology that boasts double the bandwidth of SATA servers, which are prevalent in the security industry.

BCD Video will be at ISC West booth 10039 with partner, Anixter.