Innovative partnership between vendor and integrator spotlights WeWork project

Few people have ever accused Greg Keeling of thinking small. However, some wondered aloud if he and his Queens, New York-based systems integration firm had not bitten off more than they could chew when they began a partnership with American commercial real estate company WeWork to provide security management of properties around the country. Keeling’s vision of taking large-scale security operations to the edge fit the need of an innovative company like WeWork, which manages close to five million square feet of office-leasing space from Manhattan and Boston to Seattle and San Francisco.

Keeling and his New York Security Solutions, Inc. (NYSSINC) team were approached by a member of the WeWork technology group to help them meet the challenges for improving the scale of operations for companies that were experiencing rapid growth and were stretched across multiple locations. Instead of selling the hardware and installation to the client as most integrators traditionally have done, NYSSINC proposed a more revolutionary approach. They would provide cost-effective and efficient security solutions without the client having to carry the burden of massive technology investment and installation downtime.

According to Keeling, the WeWork project began with his company acquiring existing technology and then rehabilitating it in some cases or doing new construction to the internal spaces within these buildings. Again, it was the speed of conversion that became a big selling point for WeWork, as NYSSINC essentially worked within a 60-day window from the start of the project, through design and construction, to completion and tenant move-in.

“When you think about the way the construction industry is, that's unheard of,” admits Keeling. “One of the things we did for this particular customer was to eliminate the entire concept of a proposal. That was one of the very first things we did. And I created a catalog (of options). We offered a concept proposal, saying ‘Here's your catalog. Here are the services you require to secure your operations. We aren't going to change it and will commit that (the system) will not change for two years.’"

He adds, though, after that initial two-year commitment, NYSSINC would pass along to the client any technology price discounts his firm receives. WeWork was sold. In 2014 Keeling and his team immediately assumed responsibility for 17 buildings in multiple locations that had little to no video surveillance or monitoring set up. Three of the buildings were in New York City and two each in Washington, D.C., Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

WeWork Project Needed Unique Approach

WeWork needed to centralize video surveillance management and monitoring, lower capital expense for servers, and reduce required labor to update and maintain software. In addition, they needed:

• Integration with existing cameras, avoiding the need to rip and replace

• Guaranteed video recording, even in the event of an Internet outage

• Migration of camera information from their current video solution

• Several custom features, including multi-tenant support

• Ideally, built-in business analytics to enable future business optimization

One interesting aspect of the job was the video management solution being used in the buildings at the time was a technology developed by one of the WeWork board of directors, which didn’t bother NYSSINC. Keeling admits he didn’t care what sort of VMS they were using since they weren’t pushing any particular vendor. They just wanted to manage the system and improve the scale of operations.

“I had a few developers on my team, and we had a couple of ideas on how to improve scale. One of our ideas was to improve speed by just eliminating the GUI. So, we sat down with one of those board members and told him if you give us the keys to the kingdom, essentially the password to the backend database of your buildings, we can really speed things up. He did, and the first thing that we did was to develop an application that pushes camera data directly to the database of the video management system and we stopped using the GUI in 2015,” explains Keeling.

For a regional integrator, this was a big deal. In essence, NYSSINC was managing WeWork’s global architecture and managing all their building openings for surveillance. But for now, it was just surveillance.

“We would support the integrators for them. The integrator would hang the cameras, but we would manage all the video management services. We would add the files using our application to the video management server, and essentially, what we were doing for a couple of hundred cameras would take an integrator, I don't know, four days. We'd do it in about two hours,” Keeling says, who boasts his company was operating video management capabilities before some of today’s major vendors had solutions in the market.

It’s All About Being a Service Provider

NYSSINC quickly turned into a service-provider and problem-solver for WeWork. But then all sorts of new problems started to emerge with WeWork, and they were problems that they hadn’t encountered in other industries. Part of the business model for WeWork has different types of companies all coexisting in the same space. Different types of companies have different types of compliance requirements. Some companies may require just 30 days of video, other companies may require 90 days.

Keeling was not worried. He figured that in the security industry it was an easy fix. They could install a Network Attached Storage (NAS) system, which is a storage device connected to a network that allows storage and retrieval of data from a centralized location for authorized network users and heterogeneous clients. NAS systems are flexible and scale-out, meaning that as you need additional storage, you can add on to what you have. NAS is like having a private cloud in the office. It’s faster, less expensive and provides all the benefits of a public cloud on-site, giving you complete control.

In a traditional office environment, that would have been the perfect solution, however; it didn’t fit the WeWork model.

“The problem with WeWork is their members are transient, so they may be in a building one day, and they may require 90 days in that building. But then they may outgrow that space and there may not be a space available for them in that existing building, so they need to move to another building. The problem is when you move to another building the storage can't move with you. That was the first problem that we ran into,” laments Keeling. “The obvious solution we saw was to put in these NASs at the buildings to support these members that were moving around. Some needed six months of video, some needed three months, some just needed 30 days, and a few needed a year. So, the question became, okay, we're installing all this hardware. What are we going to do with it? What if tomorrow we have other members in a building and all of them need 30 days and we have $20,000 of hardware sitting in a room that nobody is going to touch. It's too expensive for us to send somebody there to unrack it, to break it down, and move it to another building where we may need it."

Enter The Cloud Solution

Keeling and his technology solutions team had to make an evolutionary decision – and quickly. Do we maintain the status quo and build device upon device, or do we move the business to the cloud? When NYSSINC began its due diligence with potential vendor partners, it was Keeling who was pitching his concept to the vendors instead of them delivering sales pitches. Again, it was Keeling’s unique vision of managing video that immediately caught the attention of Arcules CEO, Andreas Pettersson, who was already reinventing the world of traditional video monitoring. Keeling got a face-to-face meeting with Pettersson and the bond was sealed.

“Andreas understood what I was trying to do. He understood that the problem that WeWork had was very unique to co-working spaces. It wasn't something that would benefit everybody in the security industry, at least not at this time, because the confidentiality in the industry is not there yet, but WeWork was,” Keeling says. “This was really a push to create innovation. We really had no choice.”

Pettersson admits that his meeting with Keeling was a fortuitous one. Arcules was a new player in the security space, having launched in 2017 as an integrated video surveillance service-provider bringing together video data, access control and analytics into one unified platform. This past year it unveiled its Integrated Video Cloud Service that received the SIA New Product Showcase award for cloud solutions.

“It was extremely refreshing to meet someone that basically said, ‘I have a massive scale problem and I want to bring it all to the cloud.’ Sitting down with Greg it was obvious he is a very innovative person, so sitting down and hearing someone talk about where the industry will be three to five years out…was very refreshing. He was basically saying we're here now and our enterprises will move to the cloud sooner or later, but we can do it now with you guys. For me that was like, okay, great, this will be the catalyst for our entire business,” Pettersson says, who confides that Arcules turned down a couple of other initial opportunities to partner with Keeling in this project.

Pettersson adds: “This was just a very good connect. What we would get out of it and where we're at today is a huge enterprise VSaaS deployment, probably at a scale that is very unusual for a single customer in our industry. We now have a platform that can scale beyond hundreds of thousands, if not often millions of cameras. Every single customer can scale easily up to 100,000 cameras. We wouldn't have been able to catalyst that enterprise surveillance product if it wasn't for Greg, NYSS, and WeWork.”

The strict service roadmap that Keeling was building for NYSSINC required a vendor-partner that shared the service concept and not the product hard sell. NYSSINC partnered with Arcules in large part because they were impressed with the capabilities of the solution, but also with the willingness of the Arcules team to craft a plan to meet all critical requirements, including:

• Support for seven different camera manufacturers to avoid costly replacement

• A solution for exporting camera data from the current video monitoring service

• Enabling complex user roles

• A highly intuitive user interface that would streamline user onboarding and navigation

• Built-in analytics to ultimately improve business optimization

“What made Arcules unique is they're really the only solution that I was looking at that was cloud-based and was not a vendor pushing me to buy some sort of hardware. That was a big one for me. The fact that if we had a piece of hardware that met the specification that could essentially run the Arcules application, we were then able to re-image that device and re-purpose it. That was a big one for me,” Keeling says. “There's that concept of multi-tenancy, where people can have their own unique portals that exist within a system and it feels like it's theirs. It feels like they own it, yet at a higher level, we're the one who is managing it.”

Today, the NYSSINC team supports 60,000 cameras, 20,000 access control points and manages 700 servers. And they do all this without stepping into any buildings. “We never step foot on site. Every single migration that we did here was done remotely. The re-imaging of all the hardware was done remotely. We backed up over four petabytes of video in preparation for this migration. And again, never set foot on-site,” adds Keeling.

About the Author:

Steve Lasky is a 33-year veteran of the security publishing industry and multiple-award-winning journalist. He is currently the Editorial and Conference Director for the Endeavor Business Security Media Group, the world’s largest security media entity, serving more than 190,000 security professionals in print, interactive and events. It includes Security Technology Executive, Security Business and Locksmith Ledger International magazines, and SecurityInfoWatch.com, the most visited security web portal in the world. He can be reached at [email protected]