At the Siemens booth of the 2006 ASIS International Seminars and Exhibits, Siemens Security Systems President Wegmann stressed that the pending acquisition of Atlanta-based VistaScape would not affect the product's availability to integrators.
According to Wegmann, the company is in the process of assuring integrators that although the acquisition would place the VistaScape ownership in the same parent company with Siemens security integration group (which is headed in the U.S. by George West), there would be no preferential treatment of the product for the Siemens integration arm. Wegmann stressed that the VistaScape product line, best known for its SiteIQ video management system, would be available with the same feature set, pricing and product availability for non-Siemens integrators as it would for the company's wholly owned U.S. integration channel. West's integration team, he explains, would be on a level playing field with all integrators when it came to bidding on projects that specified the VistaScape product line.
In addition, P.J. Lynch, VistaScape's president and chief operating officer, added that if the acquisition is completed, all integrators could expect to see marked product improvements to the SiteIQ platform as it integrated research on algorithms that Siemens Corporate Research division had been developing independently. VistaScape had been primarily focused on video analytics for out-of-doors applications like perimeters, explained Lynch, but the Siemens-developed algorithms are likely to bring features more appropriate to indoor, crowded scenarios.
Siemens' U.S. security operations are markedly different from the company's European security operations, chiefly in that the U.S. business has been designed to exist as a product-neutral integration firm. Most of the security product lines that Siemens owns are not available in the U.S. Wegmann noted that the arrangement allowed the company's U.S. integration unit to instead choose among the plethora of other vendor's products that are available across the integrator space, rather than to focus on selling one of Siemens' own solutions.
