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EMC enters physical security

EMC enters physical security Storage giant provides design services, risk assessments, partners with Verint

HOPKINTON, Mass.-EMC, one of the largest providers of IT solutions in the world, announced in late March its entry into the physical security marketplace. Its Physical Security Solutions service offering includes risk assessment and system design products, and leverages a partnership with Verint to implement open-architecture IP-based solutions. For the implementation piece, EMC will be seeking installation partners. "This is a follow up to the program we launched in August 2005," said Dick O'Leary, EMC's senior director, global solutions group. "We announced we were launching physical security solutions, but at that point our focus was on delivering components-a lot of storage, some software ... About a year and a half ago, Verint approached us about wanting to migrate their own solution to an enterprise level." After evaluating the Verint product suite and talking to its financial team to make sure the company had the resources to scale to an enterprise level, EMC worked with Verint on its development road map, O'Leary said. "You'll see that with the next release of Nextiva. There will be a lot more they can achieve at the platform level ... Now we're layering a service capability on top of that." Specifically, there will be three new service offerings: EMC Assessment for Physical Security, which leverages additional partnerships with companies like Unisys, British Telecom and Orion Systems Group to identify customers' technology, business and physical security requirements and identify needs regarding equipment such as cameras, alarms, video archiving, encoders, software and network services; EMC Design for Physical Security, which takes that assessment and provides a complete design of the customer's physical security environment; and EMC Implementation for Physical Security, which incorporates Verint IP video technologies with EMC's CLARiiON-based storage solution. For this last service, EMC will be building installation partnerships, though EMC will manage the process. "EMC is focused on their existing IT customer base," said Mariann McDonough, Verint's vice president of global marketing, of the opportunity for security integrators. "So I see a great benefit in their ‘making the market.' There's not enough penetration of what physical security needs and requires on the IT side. So having an EMC-led offering, delivered with security, it just drives opportunity. It educates IT buyers in a way that makes sense on their playing field. And that's a big part of this bridging the gap with IT. Now, with EMC, they're in familiar territory." ssn

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