25 YEARS OF ENTERPRISE
Salim Idris , general manager ( Middle East), Dedicated Micros looks back at 25 years of innovation as the company celebrates a quarter of a century at the cutting edge of the CCTV industry
This year represents a major landmark for us at Dedicated Micros as we celebrate an impressive 25 years as a pioneer in the fast moving CCTV industry. For a quarter of a century now we have grown and maintained a global industry leadership position, staying very much at the forefront of video management technology. To put this in perspective, every second of every day more than seven million images are recorded and viewed around the world using DM DVRs and Network Video products.
The company’s most notable innovation in recent years is the NetVu Connected core technology DNA which ensures seamless interoperability across all NetVu Connected CCTV products – plus the recently launched HighVu Excel, high performance, embedded real time range. These key pioneering developments follow in the tradition of a business whose technological advances have formed many of the building blocks for the success of today’s CCTV industry and, crucially, demonstrate a commitment to deliver effective surveillance solutions for applications whatever their size, including, increasingly, those at the enterprise level.
A history of innovation
After graduating from England’s University of Manchester in Computer Science, it was leading entrepreneur Mike Newton who was responsible for setting up Dedicated Micros in July 1982. Newton is still heavily involved in the business as CEO and CTO of AD Group – our parent company – and Deputy Chairman of Dedicated Micros.
Within two years of its formation, Newton’s business acumen had brought CCTV’s first multiplexer to market – a landmark in the industry. It was called the Cam-Plex and proved to be an instant success.
The company’s product development surged in leaps and bounds with the System Sprite, Digital Sprite Lite and the market favourite, the Digital Sprite 2. DVRs became available for every market, from the four-camera Eco line for small business to the enterprise-level BX2.
Dedicated Micros became an integral part of AD Group in 2001 – a business that Mike Newton also created – enabling Dedicated Micros to take advantage of a common technological base alongside other Group companies including AD Aerospace, AD Network Video, D-Tec, RemGuard and TSS.
In terms of the Middle East, this became an increasingly important market for the business with the result that in 2002 we were able to establish a regional base in Dubai’s Internet City to provide enhanced sales, technical and customer support to our clients in the region.
In 2005, we launched our first product line featuring NetVu Connected, a cutting-edge technology that guarantees complete interoperability and deep integration at a core system level, between AD Group products – and increasingly those of third parties – giving maximum flexibility to customers to manage multiple locations and meet the needs of specialised requirements where added value such as Video Analytics can be embedded seamlessly.
Today, at Dedicated Micros we continue to maintain our position at the forefront of CCTV technology – a good example being Multi Mode Recording designed to optimise system performance – with a wide array of products to give both long-standing and new customers quality solutions which meet the around-the-clock demands of surveillance.
Focusing on enterprise with HighVu Excel
One of our most exciting new product developments that emphasizes Dedicated Micros continuing focus on innovation is undoubtedly the HighVu Excel enterprise range. This is a modular, expandable, high performance CCTV recording and IP transmission solution with embedded analytics and scalable video wall capability which we believe represents a generational shift in the capability of systems in the enterprise field.
The HighVu Excel range has been created to deliver impressive real time, high resolution D1/4CIF resolution capture, recording and playback, of up to 1024 cameras in a single seamless configuration, viewed simultaneously across 48 monitors. This makes it ideal for government, high end retail, banking, traffic and large scale multiple site and public space surveillance.
Crucially, the HighVu Excel is a fully embedded system, which operates within the NetVu Connected environment. High definition image capture offers the capability to continually record and playback in real time on all channels - including from DM’s CamVu 2000 megapixel IP cameras – with lip-synced audio input available on each camera and no loss of performance unlike some PC based solutions.This makes it particularly suited for applications where a high level of image detail is required to identify suspects.
The scalable HighVu Excel is ideal for central control room solutions with a large number of cameras such as a shopping centre and, essentially, for end-users, including airports and sensitive government sites, where real-time, high quality image capture, embedded analytics, substantial storage capacities and lip-synched audio on cameras is invaluable.
The high performance D1/4CIF real time recording delivered by HighVu Excel is made possible by the use of the NetVu Connected dedicated embedded encoding platform based around the latest generation of specialised video processors from ChipWrights – also part of AD Group.
A question of analytics
Another major recent development for us involves Dedicated Micros offering a range of NetVu Connected CCTV products – particularly targeted at the mid-range CCTV market – that have an embedded video analytics capability from the start. We believe that this is the first truly integrated, embedded software and hardware, platform to provide intelligent CCTV solutions for a wide range of applications from transport to retail.
Video analytics capable systems now available include: the SD Range, DV-IP, DV-IP RT, DV-IP Codec, CamVu 2000, HighVu Excel and TransVu.
To deliver this industry-leading functionality we have been able to unlock the benefits of AD Group’s own NetVu Connected DSP (Digital Signal Processor) architecture provided by ChipWrights, combined with sister company D-Tec’s long-term expertise in the area of image processing through its video smoke detection products. A new range of capabilities will now be provided though D-Tec Analytics and will work on Analytics Capable products from Dedicated Micros via a simple upgrade license. The current video analytics packages on offer comprise: Object Left, Object Removed, People Counting, ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition).
The future
At Dedicated Micros our success to date has been based very much on a philosophy of constant innovation, moving rapidly from the drawing board to a physical product to meet the surveillance demands of our family of loyal customers. In the next 25 years we are likely to witness dramatic changes in CCTV, in terms of the way that images are recorded, transmitted and analysed, and as an industry leader we are determined as recent developments demonstrate to remain at the very forefront of these innovations.
 For more information on Dedicated Micros please Tel: +971 4 390 1015/6/7, GSM: +971 50 4500 149, Email: SIdris@dmicros.com or visit www.dedicatedmicros.com
|