Okay so it is no Scientific Atlanta, but still it is an acquisition. Cisco has just acquired SyPixx Networks of Waterbury Connecticut for about $51 million in cash and options. SyPixx Networks makes video surveillance software and hardware which allow the older analog video surveillance systems to operate as part of an IP network. SyPixx plays in the high-end of the video surveillance market and a typical installation can cost anywhere from $100,000 to $2 million.
Given that Cisco is moving heavily into storage, and company’s belief that everything should move over an IP network, this makes absolute sense. Of course this will help get Cisco into the fast growing government surveillance and casino (gaming) markets. SyPixx’s two main competitors are March Networks and Nice Systems although Nice is mostly voice recording and not video.
looks like this acquisition puts cisco in competition with march networks.
looks like this deal will put cisco in competition with march networks.
March’s architecture and key markets (banking, retail, transport) is fundamentally different from Sypixx’s strengths.
Cisco/Sypixx will be a strong competitor to Verint, Broadware and Pelco which all offer very similiar distrubted architectures for integrating legazy analog systems.
The deal is questionable in at least one major element – surveillance networks are moving very rapidly to IP cameras. Connecting legacy analog cameras to Sypixx encoders is neither cheaper nor significantly more effectively than simply replacing legacy analog cameras for IP cameras.
Just because everything may be moving to IP networks, it is not immediately appearant to me that, by itself, this is a strong move.