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Cisco Aquires SyPixx
illeism writes "Forbes reports that Cisco is getting into the video surveillance business. From the article,"Cisco made the acquisition to capitalize on the trend that has been underway which is moving video surveillance from analog to IP.""
Surveillance is the future. When I think of mankind's progress, I see the grand vista of cameras stretching to infinity, wiretaps that outnumber phone lines, search warrants so ubiquitous and deeply classified that no petty official need ever fear public questioning. A beautiful vision it is.
For a moment I thought it said "Cisco + SyPixxx". That would be a very different business model: software, hardware, and meatware in one package.
before Cisco finds some way to sell some horribly heineous product to the US government that involves this purchase. Since Cisco devices already run 95% of the net's backbone, purchases like this scare me.
I don't like powerful companies who are in bed with the government. I almost wish they were Israeli or Argentinian or something.
Not that I have anything against surveillance... just as long as it isn't abused
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Gezz, like CTTV over the internet is such a revolution? I used to work at a local restruant that the boss could kick back at home and watch everything going on. This was based on a Windows box with 2 8-port CCTV cards with real-time backup, etc... but this was in 2001. ;)
Now we have DVR backup, etc. Interestingly enough, SyPixx is a Linux based product. http://www.sypixx.com/ It's cool though that Cisco is giving it a go, they actually might do a good thing here. I would like to suggest a few features: like lower cost on.. dvr capacity options, pan-tilt, zoom, feature software set, (Linux based options) and low lux options.
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
So first they bought Scientific Atlanta, and now SyPixx. Cool. I thought the idea was to shake/stirr/mix'n'match Cisco's IP know-how with Scientific Atlanta's video know-how, and come up with a killer Ciscoized-Tivo. Now I'm afraid that while my Cisco Tivo records 'Desperateate Housewives' it might also include a camera and surveillance software so the NSA can watch me rooting my nose or scratching my nuts. I feel safer already ;)
Don\t mod this "troll" or "insightful", it's just a gut response.
Cisco is massive... they buy out their competition, including areas of the market they want to expand in to. That's just how they function. If you can't put out the ideas, heck, buy them. Nothing really new here.
When companies start talking about keeping a diverse portfolio (ie: lots of totally unrelated product lines), what does that mean? Well, the "obvious" conclusion is that they're not confident enough in anything they're doing and are not confident in decisions that might make or break things for the company down the road. They're not consolidating, they're not buying in any technology or IP they don't have but could use (I can't see how they can use any of it, and what they can they probably have), so that leaves hedging their bets and covering their backs.
If Cisco think IP-enabled CCTV can possibly make enough of a difference to cover the cost of the investment AND believe that none of their own products could produce as much or better return for that same amount of money, I'd look a lot harder at alternatives.
(It doesn't mean I think Cisco will fold - they're far from doing that. It means I think Cisco have run out of ideas, which is generally a much worse place to be. You can always borrow money, but fresh, quality ideas are tougher to find.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Cisco's gonna be selling webcams now? :-p
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Ignoring the various "all surveillance == big brother" comments for a moment, here's an article on CNET News.com which goes into more detail about the reasoning behind Cisco's acquisition. From the article:
...
"If you can digitize all video, you can record it, timestamp it and instantaneously get access to video across the IP network much more efficiently than having to send an actual tape," said Marthin De Beer, a vice president in Cisco's Emerging Market Technologies Group. "It also lets people coordinating a disaster halfway across the country to get live video feeds from cameras connected to an IP network, so they can see what's happening."
In addition, it makes sense for businesses that have already embarked on consolidating their networks to decide to carry all of their corporate data and voice traffic over an IP network. Cisco also provides storage area networking gear, which is essential for customers who must store all the video.
Personally, I'd like to see more development of sousveillance. IMHO, the solution to the problem of "Who watches the watchers?" isn't to ban watching, but to make everybody a watcher. It'd be great to have a publically-uploadable website designed to facilitate the coordination of images and video for events and places of concern.
All this surveilance, and not one good picture of natalie portman with some hot grits!
Check out the SyPixx web site for more about the products that Cisco is aquiring, or download this PDF catalog.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
I think this is a great move by Cisco as it gives them a good leverage in the video surveillance/recording industry and allied products and technologies and services.
Given their dominance in the Networking market, I guess, we'd see cheaper/better products to stream videos on the net and may be quite a few new technologies brought out by them, creating new parallels in a market where there is a high degree of segmentation between various products and services provided by the current manufacturers/organizations as no one holds a huge market share in a co-related market to come up with or enforce a set of protocols/products that work out of the box/ are easy to manage and cost around a few cups of coffee.
If Cisco can do that, then, I'd say they're on solid ground for making good money for another decade...
i live on an alternate planet
Now, you shouldn't just mod him down for the marketing alone, but more for the lack of effort. I mean, his sig just completely gives the game away!
Slashdot should demand a higher standard of viral marketing troll. We deserve better than this amature.
May the Maths Be with you!
Last I looked into IP cameras weren't quite there yet, especially in terms of price/performance ratio. I started out looking for a camera with a pretty typical use case in mind - outdoor surveillance for an office building. Someone was stealing dumpsters worth a few thousand each from a new heating and air conditioning business, and it was happening at night. There is a lot of mob and union influence in the HVAC industry, and they didn't like the new guy in town's hiring practices. The cops seemed to care less so he wanted to catch them red handed.
The requirements came down to being weatherproof, and also having low light capability for night surveillance. As I began pricing things out, I found IP cameras could be had at low starting prices, around $200, but that those models were useless for real surveillance apps. Here are the pitfalls I found.
A) Most IP cameras below $400-$500 lack an auto-iris, but rather simulate one in software. If you can't mechanically restrict how much light is getting to the CCD sensor, you have to sacrifice sensitivity to the point where night time images won't be useful.
B) Many IP cameras use cheap CCD chips. In the CCTV industry people look for SONY Super-HAD and Ex-View CCD chips because of their night time sensitivity. Try finding something IP based with one of these CCDs and see what it costs you. An analog b&w SONY Super-HAD night camera can be had for $115, and a color daytime model only $185. IP Camera? About $1000. Want color and a good night picture? You need a model that uses solenoid to remove the IR cut filter when it gets dark, otherwise the night picture will be no good. Good luck finding an IP version with this at a reasonable price. The cost for a color analog camera with a mechanical day/night filter is $235.
C) Weatherproof models command a much bigger premium than their analog counterparts.
D) Network bandwidth may be an issue for large setups, as full frames are sent via mjpeg. Court precedent says that to be admissable, digital video footage must be stored as complete frames, so count out any of the mpeg codecs.
Now also figure this, whether you use an analog or IP camera you will still need a computer to store all your footage. $50 is what a 4 channel BTTV based CCTV capture board will cost you, and they are much less on ebay. In terms of software, ZoneMinder is open source and will stream compressed video across the internet while recording high quality frames locally. It supports any format ffmpeg supports, even flash video, and does things like auto-cycling and motion detection recording w/ user definable sensitivity areas.
For a 4 camera setup an IP camera solution will cost nearly 3x to 4x as much as analog. So I have judged them as being useful only for large corporate customers with deep pockets. Anyone here using ip cameras, especially for outdoor surveillance? What do you use and what did it cost?
Surveillance is good for security. If you want to have security you need surveillance, there is no other way to protect yourself or your property, so I think this surveillance is a good thing as long as the price is cheap enough for the average person to buy.
On the collective level, Surviellance is good for America and good for national security. There are no drawbacks to surveillance. When you have better surveillance you don't need as many police officers, you also have better evidence to use against criminals who commit crimes. If you arent a criminal and arent commiting crimes what do you have to worry about?
Surveillance is and always was good for business. What is important is that this surveillance technology be cheap enough so that all businesses and businessmen can afford to buy it. If Cisco does not bring down the price, then I'll be against THEIR surveillance solution. If the price is cheap enough, or if there are open source alternatives, bring on the surveillance.
Surveillance is not bad. It's good! So lets all agree that surveillance is good for national security, in specific if we are going to protect our business interests we NEED surveillance.
If we are going to go with open source web surveillance, I actually think it would be one of the best ideas we have to fight the war against terrorism. When you can upload the surveillance to many eyes, or at least to the eyes within your business, it's the best security you can have.
So in a way, I think Cisco is making the correct move. I don't know why people are thinking like this is a bad move when we are in a war against terrorism, we SHOULD be moving towards global surveillance, we should be moving towards better security related technologies, and we SHOULD be doing this in an open source model, because this would make the technology much cheaper, and free. I guess for some reason people on Slashdot have the old era style of thinking that we don't need any security, and that if you just leave your businesses unguarded that everything will be okay. Look, we HAVE no security unless we create it, we HAVE no security if we don't even have surveillance, the most basic of basic in security technology.
In the future, everyone will know everything about everybody, and it will be searchable through Google, or bought and sold through the market. This is just the way things are headed, and I do not blame Cisco for making the obvious business decision of being ahead of the curve.
What is their pricing strategy? What are the costs? This technology is fine, if the price is right, but if this technology costs tens of thousands of dollars its ultimately going to be something which does not apply to the majority of small businesses.
I say if it's under the $5000 price range, it take off like wild fire, but over this price point and it will be too costly for most small businesses.
I worry about the price of these technologies, but I think if the price is right, it will take off. I could easily see many small businesses, in fact the majority of them, buying into this technology. I'd buy Cisco stock if they handle this right.
Except they call it "a video telephony USB camera"... but yeah, a webcam... damn, can't even make a joke! :-p
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
In Capitalist West Cisco watch you on internet.
Cisco. Watching the way you work, live, play, and learn.
Cisco. Monitoring the Internet generation.
Cisco. The fastest way to increase your Laogai population.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laogai
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
"Cisco made the acquisition to capitalize on the trend that has been underway..."
It used to be that you had to watch your servers carefully, now the servers will carefully watch you.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Having worked for a company who were taken over by Cisco, I can confirm that it's not a bad company to be bought into. The good thing is that they are buying a) to expand their portfolio with an existing product and b) that they're pretty happy with the product so apart from some integration, which may be rebadging (or not). Downside is that while development teams will be maintained and either plugged into Cisco's net or brought into the local office (even turned into a local office), support often seems to get integrated into Cisco's helpdesks with the result that backup staff are the ones to go. I had a good employer who shared in the dividend, even when he didn't need to, but after a few months, our product was put into Cisco support and I was out of job. Had a good time though.
Reminds me of a stark future movie by Terry Gilliam....
:)
Oh! which one, you say? Brazil!
It's a twist on some of the 1984 concepts, as with a number of other films by Gilliam
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind. - Dr. Seuss
Cisco's been slurping up a number of firms that make products that kind fit in the networking scheme of things, and those products that aren't actual networking hardware and up being rolled into CiscoWorks. And, the hardware products they do acquire end up being managed via Ciscoworks.
Ciscoworks is one of the worst software packages ever inflicted on people. If you have any other java product on your PC, either it will stop working, or you won't be able to access ciscoworks in any way other than the console of the pc it runs one (or via remote console, if it will let you). That's just the Ciscoworks framework itself. Then, each product that Cisco drops into cisco works has its own way of doing things, and compatability issues, and they're not minor.
Even in the ciscoworks framework itself, there's no central set of configuration options to control where alerts get sent, what thresholds are, how to add/remove managed devices, and so forth (this list goes on and on and on). Ciscoworks leads you to think that its an integrated product, but that's as far from the truth as you can get. Its horribly schitzophrenic in the user interface to the point that if you figure out how to configure one sub-system, you're at a loss as to how to deal with the others. Its not unheardof for one ciscoworks component to be incompatible with other ciscoworks components, requiring multiple separate ciscoworks servers. Its like having multiple migraines. Oh, and ciscoworks pretends to run syslog, but has no log management capabilities or any real log analysis tools. Just a few precanned reports to try and make you happy.
If cisco rolls management of these products into Cisco!Works for setup and ongoing management, about the only thing you can be assured of is that whatever video does get recorded by the 'networked cisco video cameras', will not be viewable a significant portion of the time. I've used Cisco!works for years, and this is really not an eggageration.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Just so you guys are aware, Sypixx makes CCTV systems which are primarily sold into casinos as part of their government-mandated gaming regulation compliance. They don't seem to sell much if anything to Big Brother type markets.
I never expected this to be national news, when he told me about a week ago (although at that time, they only knew they'd been acquired - it was rumored that it was Cisco, but they didn't know). Such a small company, I never expected it would be such big news.
Of course, this means their R&D is supposedly moving to CA (from Waterbury, CT), which doesn't make me happy.
-Daniel
Poor Cicso, I heard that you could take penicillin to clear that up...