If a picture is worth a thousand words, and a moving picture is worth even more, then why can't you integrate video into the core data of your enterprise?
That's the question that Vantum, a Boulder, Colo.-based company, is hoping to get resellers to ask here at the NetWorld Interop show. Vantum used the show to unveil its Active Video Appliance products, compact devices designed to turn video into another type of data to be managed, mined and utilized as easily as traditional data.
"Video has been held back by infrastructure limitations, client power and storage," says Howdy Pierce, Vantum's president and CEO. "Those things have been pretty much taken care of by now. Now, the need is for a means to integrate video with the rest of the computing environment, and do it in as simple a way as possible."
To do this, Vantum has built what are essentially very small computers with a digital video camera on one end, according to Pierce. The devices are capable of streaming video at up to 30 frames per second over an enterprise IP network. The appliance connects to the network through an Ethernet port, and can be integrated into the existing IP management infrastructure.
While the appliances can stream video at 30 frames per second, they don't have to do that all the time. Lower rates can be used to conserve network resources, and the built-in hard drive in the C1d and M1d models allows for playback at maximum quality.
The appliances can be controlled through embedded JavaScript and a code-generating wizard that prompts users to help set up rules to allow the appliance to behave intelligently. "The appliances can sense their environment," Pierce says. "They can be set to come on when they detect motion or an audible voice, for example."
This makes them an obvious option for security applications, but with a twist. "Let's say the appliance detects motion somewhere," Pierce explains. "It can then record what's going on in high-quality video--not that grainy black-and-white, two-frames-a-minute video. At the same time, it can alert the guard or the administrator with an e-mail or a message to his PDA."
Pierce envisions a world where the appliances are used for everything from conducting research on sales patterns in retail stores to aiding in telemedicine applications. For companies running lights-out data centers, the appliances could help pinpoint problems without the need to send technicians to each site.
"Of the outages in data centers, 80 percent are the result of goofy human errors," Pierce says. "Our appliance could be integrated with a security card system or use its motion-detection feature so that every time a technician goes in to work in a data center, his actions can be recorded and errors can be spotted on the video."
Vantum is marketing four appliances---the C1 and C1d, which include an integrated camera module, and the M1 and M1d, which are designed to integrate with existing analog video sources, like legacy cameras and ultrasound machines. Prices for the appliances range from $1,295 to $1,995.
