Unity Surveillance Systems: The 'Core' of Surveillance

Not often does one come across a company’s CEO or president on the field, getting into the act. But the leaders of Unity Surveillance Systems are unlike other head honchos; they personally supervise all the activities to ensure client satisfaction. Such is the culture and dedication toward clients in the Unity Surveillance Systems’ “family,” for which several complex problems have proven to be no-brainers. A leading provider of intelligent video solutions, Unity fills the void left by unintelligent video management systems (VMS) through a complete, easily customizable and user-friendly application that is compatible with open hardware. “The name ‘Unity’ stands for the gathering of multiple modules into one ‘Core’ component using APIs,” says Sam Sihan, CEO, Unity Surveillance Systems.

Developed on the Unity Core is the company’s VMS solution for enterprises, C20/20—a powerful video review application built by integrating numerous tools and functions for an enhanced user experience. C20/20 provides the ability to view more content and is hardware-agnostic. Unity has also created an operating system, which turns servers into network video recorders (NVR) without affecting their core functionality. Unity works with numerous product integrators and manufacturers to create its own designs of professional grade cameras as well as encoders and decoders for a complete, end-to-end hardware–software system. “We work directly with developers and have written API Frameworks and Drivers for a number of major brands,” mentions Sihan.

Jonathan Terauchi, President, Unity Surveillance Systems, mentions that Unity goes the extra mile to understand a client’s objectives before bidding for a project, to figure out the most appropriate solution. Unity performs all programming in-house led by Director of Development, Brian Moore. “To make the solution easy to use, we only enable features in the Core application that clients request,” states Terauchi, adding that customers are charged only for enabled features. Post deployment, users enjoy a highly available surveillance system that allows operators to experience a truly cutting-edge technology right at their fingertips.

Clients are entitled to a comprehensive warranty package of up to five or seven years depending on the solution, along with round-the-clock technical support where skilled technicians arrive on site within hours of raising a request. Unity also provides an upgrade plan for customers to replace their old and obsolete equipment with new systems.

We enabled hybrid migration from analog to IP system without completely abandoning the former

Unity’s value proposition to clients struck a chord with a famous casino brand that sought to upgrade its analog VMS to an IP-based system with high-resolution cameras, but could not afford to unplug the VMS system completely. The proposition required a virtual matrix to be built into the system, but the analog cameras that connected to a hardware matrix through BNC cables offered no scope for doing so. The OEM that had deployed the analog VMS systems for the casino could not be of help due to incompatibility between the analog and digital systems. When brought onboard, Unity created a solution using its management application to take the feeds from the analog matrix to a customized encoder/ decoder hardware solution and display all video feeds onto the video wall controlled by Unity’s C20/20 application allowing the customer to fully displace all of the OLD VMS workstations. Not only was the transition seamless with no disruption to monitoring, but the client’s uptime crossed 99 percent without replacing old hardware. “We enabled hybrid migration from analog to IP system without completely abandoning the former,” states Sihan.

With several successful client engagements, Unity is growing exponentially. In future, Sihan mentions that the company intends to “grow smartly” by assisting organizations with limited budgets to improve their VMS infrastructure. With a sound business strategy and value proposition, Unity is bound to take the VMS and surveillance domain by storm.