While the IDIS brand may be relatively new to security practitioners in North America, the South Korean video company is certainly not a novice to the industry. IDIS wants to become the go-to provider for video surveillance and company officials believe that what they offer with their DirectIP solutions is unmatched in the industry today.
Having been an original design manufacturer (ODM) of products for a number of years prior to launching their own branded solution in North America, Keith Drummond, senior director of sales for IDIS America said that what differentiates the company from others can be summed up in three areas: the ability to offer a total solution for video, the lower total cost of ownership that they offer, and the ease of installation and maintenance they provide to systems integrators, some of whom Drummond said have been able to reduce their installation time ten-fold by leveraging DirectIP.
“There are people out there that talk about having a total solution and, frankly, there are different versions of that. You can look at some of these companies that have brought things outside of video surveillance in and they’re calling it a total solution for physical security as a whole, but our focus is obviously integration with other aspects of physical security, but our total solution is video surveillance - end-to-end from image capture at the camera all the way to the display of that image on the monitor side,” said Drummond. “We’ve got this history of high-quality technology, so our failure rate is absolutely fabulous compared to some of our other competitors.”
Additionally, the company’s video management software also comes with no additional license fees charged to the end user. And while many people may be skeptical of the company’s products and potentially wonder if they are sacrificing quality in favor of being able to offer a lower price, company executives on hand at ASIS 2015 this week in Anaheim, Calif., say their ability to innovate and optimize the different components in the video surveillance ecosystem while also addressing pain points traditionally associated with storage, power consumption and compatibility among other things help them stand out from the crowd.
Following the official rollout of IDIS America at ISC West in April, Drummond said they have learned that their assumptions about the market have turned out to be true and that their go-to-market strategy is sound.
“The marketplace was asking for this, so as we’ve gone to the integrators and we’ve had the opportunity, not to just give them a sales pitch, but to sit down and show them our technology – we see light bulbs go off,” added Drummond. “We’ve had integrators into our Dallas facility where we have our training and demo room and as we get the chance to really start walking them through a demo and watching how the system is expedited, they will sit back and we will usually get two responses: one of them will be someone on the network side and the other will be in a small- to mid-sized systems integration business, an owner or somebody with PNL concerns, and that integration guy will say, ‘My job just got a lot easier. What I just saw changes how I deploy systems.’”
According to Andrew Myung, president of IDIS America, one of the biggest challenges for the company is increasing their brand recognition and awareness in the U.S. as their technology has historically been in the products that other people sell as their own. Once they’re able to get in front of that curtain and educate people about their solutions and their value proposition, Myung believes that will change.
From an end user’s perspective, Albert Ryu, Ph.D., senior executive vice president and COO for IDIS, said that some of the greatest benefits they can provide are reliability and ease of use.
“When we designed our DVR, we thought about how and why and we tried to make our system easy,” he said.
With regards to the optimization of IDIS products for surveillance, Ryu said a comparison he likes to draw can be found in the smartphone market with the Android and iOS platforms. While Android is primarily focused on developing open software for a variety of handsets, Apple makes both its own hardware and software, which he said makes it more optimized for users.
In contrast to some of the other more well-known Asian-based video manufacturers, IDIS President and CEO Young-Dal Kim, Ph.D., said that IDIS is not concerned with making consumer electronic devices but is solely focused on video surveillance and continuing to deliver innovative products to the marketplace.
“We are and we will be the specialist for video surveillance,” he said.
