Lee Bingham, Paul Smith’s head of IT, commented that when the company planned to move its legacy CCTV system to his command, he insisted it also switch to IP. “If it’s not IP then it’s not IT,” Bingham said, “and therefore it made no sense to move it from our facilities management team over to the IT department unless the CCTV system was going to be accessible on the network by authorized managers from their desktops.”
The IT department developed a three-year global migration plan from analog to IP surveillance. “The installation and networking of the new video platform is being carried out as part of a global IT infrastructure upgrade,” Milestone points out, “along with new retail point-of-sale and enterprise-resource-planning systems.”
After a search process, the IT department chose Milestone XProtect Corporate VMS and Axis network cameras. The department also chose Axis video encoders to bring some existing analog CCTV cameras onto the corporate network ahead of the full IT and IP video upgrade. Bingham said, “The fact that Milestone XProtect is built on an open platform architecture using Microsoft Active Directory makes rapid rollout possible, as well as cost-effective maintenance and support. Selecting Milestone enables us to migrate the whole CCTV estate onto a single platform to establish uniformity and consistency.