Cisco Zooms In On Video Surveillance Market

Cisco Systems’ portfolio continues to expand as part of the company’s effort to build more intelligent networks.

Last week the company unveiled plans to enter the physical security market via an agreement to acquire SyPixx Networks, a privately held video surveillance vendor. The $51 million deal will bring SyPixx’s portfolio of 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 existing 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. In particular, such solutions should be attractive to vertical markets such as gaming, retail and homeland security, he said.

The video surveillance products will provide a new way for customers to get even more value out of their Cisco-powered networks, said Ethan Simmons, partner at NetTeks Technology Consultants, Boston. “It’s a natural add-on to services that we’re already providing,” Simmons said. “Video is just another application you can put on the network,” he said.

On the channel front, Cisco will likely bring out physical security via its Advanced Technology Provider program, an initiative it uses to roll out emerging technology areas to a select group of channel partners while it develops a broader channel strategy, Thurber said. Cisco will likely work first with SyPixx’s approximately one dozen channel partners and then identify interested partners within its own solution provider ranks, he said.After the deal closes, Cisco expects physical security to became 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. The sale is expected to close in the third quarter of Cisco’s fiscal year 2006, ending April 28.