EMC announces surveillance management application

EMC, which recently expressed its intention to focus more on security, announced Tuesday that it has begun offering a package geared to manage and analyze surveillance data.

The company's decision reflects a greater focus within the IT industry not only on software security but on physical security as well, and comes as EMC continues its effort to branch out from storage into other sectors such as research management and physical security data analysis.

The EMC Surveillance Analysis and Management Solution (SAMS) consists of hardware, software, and professional services. Items such as EMC storage arrays and content addressed storage systems are included in the bundle, as well as additional capabilities such as video cameras, which are provided by partnerships with security providers.

The package is designed to appeal to organizations that deal with a large amount of surveillance data -- video footage or keycard information, for example -- and need to create a comprehensive system to utilize and analyze that data.

"This solution is appropriate for federal, state and local government agencies, retailers, casinos, financial institutions and other market sectors," said EMC spokeswoman Hadley Weinzierl in an e-mail interview.

The new product reflects the focus on security within the storage industry. EMC was a pure storage company until 2002 but over the last three years it has diversified through acquisitions, such as that of network management company Smarts in February 2005, and through packaging efforts like SAMS.

SAMS has been picked up by the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice to be used in its thirty facilities, which are separated into five levels of security.

"The SAMS solution allows an analytic review of any number of flagged events, " said Michael Dossett, Deputy Commissioner of the Commonwealth of Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice. "The key to this particular project is that we needed a scalable architecture that is turnkey. It addresses all of our key goals but more importantly it gives us the ability to determine how each [piece of equipment] is used....It is a turnkey solution in terms of hardware and software."

SAMS is available immediately, but EMC declined to provide pricing information. Because the product is scalable, it is available to potential customers component by component, and pricing is variable, Weinzierl said.