Panasonic Partners with Cisco

March 30, 2007
Agreement links companies for developing of interoperable products, sharing of network best practices

Panasonic Security Systems announced Wednesday during ISC West 2007 that it has partnered with Cisco. An agreement between the two companies places Cisco as Founding Partner of the Panasonic Solution Developer Network (PSDN), a network that Panasonic founded recently to help spur collaboration among different vendors and platform developers.

The move is extremely strategic for Panasonic, a company which recently made the move into the IP surveillance camera market and which has continued to unveil a number of class-leading IP cameras. The agreement links the two companies both in product development as well as solutions marketing, and ties Cisco's best practices in with the strong surveillance product development arm of Panasonic Security Systems.

Michael Maddox, Panasonic system sales engineer and PSDN program manager, said the program will help vendors share protocols and speed the development of IP-based physical security products that behave well upon corporate networks. Similarly, Cisco's Steve Collen similarly stressed that this kind of cross-vendor collaboration is essential to the interoperability that end-users will require from vendors as adoption of IP surveillance increases.