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IBM to develop packaged security systems |
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IT Security -
News
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Written by Jennifer Brown
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Friday, 28 March 2008 10:25 |
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Page 1 of 2
IBM has restructured the way it is selling its Smart Surveillance analytics product in Canada, saying it will produce pre-packaged “cookie cutter” systems for retail, banking and public sector clients who are ready for video analytic tools, rather than sell the system independently.
When the tech giant first entered the physical security industry two
years ago it had dedicated sales people in Canada who were
demonstrating Smart Surveillance — then known as S3 — to large
customers including banks, retailers and school boards and courted
physical security customers with the help of technology partners such
as March Networks.
IBM says the change in the way the analytics product is being presented
to the market in Canada is more a reflection of the way the business is
maturing.
“We definitely are in the physical security business – but that now has
become part of business as usual as part of the overall portfolio of
IBM,” says Jeanne Jang, leader, IBM Global Services in New York. “There
are no longer the lone rangers out there – we’re now bringing together
the right experts from the software group the right expert from
hardware division and so forth.”
In the past, IBM would try and understand what the customer needed with the surveillance system and customize it for them.
“However, we find in this business that there are lower margins and we
need to be able to replicate things in a more consistent fashion,” says
Steve Russo, director of technology for physical security and privacy
at IBM in the U.S.
The company is also going to focus its efforts exclusively on the retail, banking and government sector.
“For 2008 we wanted to be a lot more targeted in terms of the customers
we were going after,” says Jang. “We prioritized financial services,
retail and public sector around city-wide surveillance and overall
public safety opportunities. We’re moving to this model where we have a
set of pre-packaged solutions that we can roll out to bank branches and
to retail services with minimal customization and with the majority of
the development work done in the U.S. and replicated out to the selling
teams in the geographies.”
IBM has tried to incorporate elements of business intelligence into its
surveillance strategy, especially when targeting retail customers who
have more experience using analytics to drive market data.
“One of the things we wanted to do is leverage analytics to solve not
only security, but very specific business problems both in financial
services and retail because it would be around loss prevention,” says
Jang. “Also, more and more we’re talking to chief marketing officers
about their interest in using this technology to get better customer
behaviour data.”
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