Cisco To Buy Video Surveillance Vendor

The $51 million deal, slated to close in Cisco’s fiscal third quarter ending April 28, would bring SyPixx’s analog-to-digital video camera encoders, digital-to-analog video monitor decoders, analog video transmission equipment, video recording and management products into the Cisco fold.

The new products will enable Cisco channel partners to build solutions that tie video surveillance deployments into converged, IP-based solutions, said Alex Thurber, director of security for worldwide channels at Cisco, San Jose, Calif.

“We’re ultimately driving toward the whole idea of the connected building, everything on one wire,” Thurber said. Such solutions should be attractive to vertical markets such as gaming, retail and homeland security, he said.

On the channel front, Cisco will likely bring out physical security via its Advanced Technology Provider program, which the company uses to roll out emerging technology to select channel partners while it develops a broader channel strategy, Thurber said. Cisco probably will work with SyPixx’s dozen or so channel partners first and then identify interested partners in its own solution provider ranks, he said.

After the acquisition closes, Cisco expects physical security to become a new emerging technology area and plans to incorporate the products into a new business unit under Marthin De Beer, vice president of Cisco’s Emerging Market Technologies Group.

SyPixx, Waterbury, Conn., was founded in 2004 and has 27 employees.