Planning to reach 100 Active Channel Partners in India by Mid-2018, and accelerate business growth VIVOTEK plans to reach 100 active channel partners by mid-2018. The company, which has successfully cleared numerous product trials as well as led several successful projects across the world, hopes to accelerate its business growth with its full-stack channel partner program for both new and existing partners. The program enables its partners to leverage the organization’s position as a leader in the IP surveillance segment, and in the process, further scale its business. Apart from channel partners, the program also includes dealers, resellers and system integrators. VICOTEK is currently working with 75 channel partners across India, and is promoting their growth under its partner program, which is available to all those who are purchasing from VIVOTEK authorized distributors. The program is designed in 3 levels, viz., Bronze, Silver and Gold, and offers various exclusive benefits to all VIVOTEK partners. To stay top of the industry and strengthen networks with partners, VIVOTEK created a global education initiative called VIVOTEK Warrior Academy. The program provides comprehensive courses for fundamental knowledge, system design, and technical details essential for IP surveillance systems to enhance professional expertise and maintain competitive edge in today’s market. “At VIVOTEK, we are always committed to provide our channel partners with extended services, resources, and margins to sustain their competitive advantage and ensure the success of our business in the long run. Moreover, our Partner Program enables all our channel partners to scale their own businesses by strengthening VIVOTEK’s position in the fast developing network video solution market.” – Sanjeev Gulati Country Manager, India and SAARC, VIVOTEK Inc.  

Schneider Electric appoints Meenu Singhal as the Vice President of its Industry business in India. In his new role, Meenu will be responsible for accelerating Schneider Electric’s growth of the business with a focus on automation of industries and will drive the push for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) platform across businesses for building greater efficiencies. Meenu’s joining comes at an exciting time in industrial automation, with the IIoT offering unprecedented possibilities of building efficiencies across an entire system of an industrial operation. Schneider Electric is at the forefront of this technology wave with its cutting-edge solutions and innovation at every level, which is being delivered through EcoStruxure™, an IoT-enabled, open and interoperable system architecture and platform for plants and machines. Speaking on the appointment, Anil Chaudhry, Managing Director and Country President, Schneider Electric India said, “Meenu joins us at a time when businesses are looking at leveraging the Make in India campaign to develop India as a hub of global manufacturing. Meenu’s immense experience will facilitate front end delivery from our businesses to this critical requirement in the market.” Meenu Singhal brings with him a rich experience of over 26 years in the field of automation. Following his graduation as an Electrical Engineer he took a post graduate degree in Marketing Management from IMT, Ghaziabad. “I am excited to take over as a leader of Industry and Automation at a time when businesses are looking at leveraging technology to automate and drive serious efficiencies in business. Schneider Electric is uniquely positioned as a global leader in automation industry and our focus as a team is to ensure business continuity and value creation through innovative offerings. I look forward to bringing in my experience on board at Schneider Electric to take the business forward.” – Meenu Singhal Vice President, India Industry Business, Schneider Electric  

Enters World Top 4 and Asia Top 2 Clubs CP PLUS is scaling heights and has recently won twin acclaims in the industry. As per the latest IHS Survey, CP PLUS elevates to Global Top 4 club having catapulted from Global Top 7 list just last year. CP PLUS has also secured a position in the Asia Top 2 Club. The company boasts of an expansive portfolio of products and solutions including analogue, IP, digital video recorders (DVRs), network video recorders (NVRs), mobile DVRs, video door phones (VDPs), video encoders, video management Software (VMS) and so on; and each of these products is exclusively designed at the CP PLUS TeknoLogix Labs and manufactured in the state-of- the-art manufacturing facilities. Furthermore, all CP PLUS products undergo stringent quality tests to meet international quality standards such as UL, CE, FCC etc. Today, CP PLUS range of solutions and products are monitoring millions of locations across the globe in diverse geographies, from highly sensitive defense locations, government buildings, vital infrastructures, transportation, hotels, educational institutes, to homes with satisfied customer base. “It’s been a story of hard work, dedication and determination. We’re blessed to have a great team at work without which none of these would have been possible. Also, our commitment towards serving in the best interests of our consumers is what paid off. Our sole focus was to bring value to our customers and we’ve always been driven towards making it better with the passing time.” – Aditya Khemka Founder & CEO – CP PLUS  

  Organisations in India are dedicating more budget to cybersecurity Palo Alto Networks, the next-generation security company, has recently announced the results of its report entitled ‘The State of Cybersecurity in Asia-Pacific,’ which reveals that cybersecurity budgets have increased for 92 per cent of organisations in India. This survey was conducted to help gain deep insights around behavior and attitudes towards cybersecurity throughout the Asia-Pacific region, including India. Key findings in India revealed: There has been recent growth in cybersecurity budgets: Businesses acknowledge the importance of ensuring business continuity amidst the persistence and growing sophistication of cyberthreats, and 92 per cent of organisations have increased their budget for cybersecurity in this financial year. Internal and external challenges contribute to cybersecurity issues: The three major cybersecurity challenges organisations face are employees’ lack of cybersecurity awareness (47 per cent), risk from third-party services (43 per cent) and migration to cloud (35 per cent). ‘Detect and respond’ approach overrules a ‘breach prevention’ strategy, but this needs to be revisited: 79 per cent of respondents indicated their organisations place more importance on detection and response of cyberthreats than prevention. Data breaches remain costly, meanwhile, with 41 per cent of respondents revealing they have lost at least INR 64,55,500 (US$100,000) in financial year 2016-17 due to such breaches. This raises question around the effectiveness of responding to threats only after incidents are detected, rather than taking a preventive stance. Cybersecurity measures adopted are rather basic: According to the survey, organisations predominantly adopt basic security measures. Respondents indicated the highest adoption rates for antivirus (77 per cent) and firewall (74 per cent); whereas anti-ransomware (37 per cent), two-factor authentication (35 per cent) and biometrics (46 per cent) have fallen on the lower end of the spectrum. Organisations are filling their need for dedicated cybersecurity talent: 95 per cent of Indian organisations feel they have a strong hold of dedicated IT teams against cyberthreats – a notably high figure compared to other APAC countries with only 84 percent. Manufacturing and finance sectors are the top verticals when it comes to ensuring they are well-equipped with a professional team to prevent cyberthreats. Across the Asia-Pacific region, the key finding from the report is the need to promote greater cybersecurity awareness and education among organisations. While budgets are increasing, 46 per cent of Asia-Pacific organisations are struggling to keep up with the increasingly sophisticated cyberthreats and finding the appropriate solutions to combat them. “Internal and external threats look like the biggest loophole causing organisations costly data breaches. Therefore, these organisations should revisit their cybersecurity strategy and assess whether the widely-adopted ‘detect and respond’ approach may be reacting to threats a little too late. As cyberthreats become increasingly sophisticated, businesses should ensure that networks are adequately secured with a next-generation security platform that looks at prevention rather than remediation.” – Sean Duca Vice President and Regional Chief Security Officer Palo Alto Networks, Asia-Pacific  

With a multi-site deployment consisting of Sophos SG UTMs, Vectus could move to a secure and productively running network environment Since 1989, Vectus has been involved in the manufacturing of various plastic tanks, piping systems and moulded articles. The company has a lion’s share of the market, enjoying average growth of 35% from last nine years, with present turnover of INR 600 Crores (USD90 million). Vectus attributes its success to understanding the needs of the target markets, coupled with placing technology at the core of its competitive differentiation. Challenges Vectus relies on efficient IT and networking to enable smooth and secure collaboration between its branch offices and field teams. Recently, it became imperative for Vectus to overhaul its network security while being able to restore IT productivity, which has been compromised due to unregulated internet access and poor visibility into user activity. Among other challenges included frequent occurrences of server downtime that led to loss of precious man-hours and unavailability of critical business applications. Moreover, absence of effective security controls for web, application and user activities added to increased threat exposure and heightened risk to data and critical network resources. The need for a monitoring tool emerged as the team further examined the environment. Vectus evaluated top 5 UTM vendors including Sophos but eventually chose Sophos SG UTM for its ‘all-in-one’ protection and a rich set of on-box features, which clearly ensured unmatched security, RoI and committed post-sales support vis-à-vis other UTM solutions. Solution Vectus replaced the existing appliance with Sophos SG UTM 220 in high availability (HA) for its ease-of-deployment, simpler management for day-to-day tasks, comprehensive threat coverage and reporting. Following the deployment of Sophos SG UTM 220 and 330 at datacenter sites and SG 115 at select branch offices, Vectus’ networking and IT teams could get up speed quickly and could resolve network downtime, and unproductive and risk-prone internet usage. Implementing Sophos SG UTM has enabled Vectus to save and increase precious bandwidth, manage connections and aggregate across multiple links safely, while supporting seamless failover options and high availability. Results With Sophos, Vectus Industries achieved the following benefits: End network downtime, improve visibility and performance for a distributed environment. Achieve reliable and comprehensive threat coverage against malware, spyware, proxy and other likely malicious activities or attacks. Successfully block network intrusions and unproductive apps and websites that were causing network slowdowns and might have caused data breaches. Smooth and secure transaction of data between branch locations. The ‘all in one box’ platform of Sophos SG UTM provides IT admins with quicker response times and a rich set of on-box capabilities to respond to all change requests, and any incidents that may occur on the network. With automatically updated IPS, advanced threat protection, user based URL filtering and built-in VPN, Vectus could put all malicious traffic at bay while enabling secure and authorized access for legitimate users to server and network resources. “We found Sophos SG UTM ticking all the checkboxes for ease of use, extent of threat coverage and availability of on-box tools. The all-in-one box dramatically reduced time spent in securing data and users. We saved 12 man days, which translates to annual gain of INR 1.2 crore.” – Manish Sinha Head IT, Vectus  

Commissioning IP surveillance project in association with Network Technology Varun Beverages limited is one of the largest franchisee in the world (outside US) of carbonated soft drinks (CSD) and non-carbonated beverages (NCB) sold under trademarks owned by PepsiCo. It produces and distributes a wide range of CSDs and NCBs, including packaged drinking water. In addition, it has also been granted the franchise for Ole brand of PepsiCo products in Sri Lanka. In a bid to ensure security and operational efficiency, Varun Beverages deployed analogue surveillance solutions in multiple areas. However, despite its efforts, the company suffered a number of thefts, and they attributed the crises to the poor image quality and limited coverage area of their existing analogue surveillance solutions. They found their daily operations are usually suffering from such lapse. The deployments were aimed to keep a check on the upkeep of the machines, daily manpower, and maintenance of hygiene and operations, but the blurred videos and low image qualities could not attain the purpose. Face recognitions were difficult and activities in areas at certain distance were not clearly visible. Entangled cabling issues were the added ache. VIVOTEK along with Network Technology acquainted Varun Beverages with the IP surveillance solutions to counter their issues. The idea was to equip the brand with contemporary security solutions and bring them at par with the evolving security threats. The duo highlighted technical glitches the brand was experiencing and the inadequacies associated with analogue based surveillance to address current threat landscape. Varun Beverages needed something highly reliable, consistent in performance and more accurate. After having analyzed the situation, VIVOTEK and Network Technology suggested altering their analogue surveillance solution to IP. They offer complete end-to-end solution from general surveillance to pinpoint surveillance at various check points in the plants. Offering appropriate models for the brand’s varied needs, VIVOTEK and its associate partner segregated the camera for multiple sites on the basis of different locations. Including 5-megapixel 360 degree surround view fisheye camera FE8180, robust Full-HD speed dome camera SD8363E, 3-megapixel outdoor ready 180 degree view fisheye camera CC8370-HV, 2-megapixel 15 meters IR illuminator fixed dome camera FD8169, and two bullet type cameras IB8369 and IB8367. All of the cameras are united inVIVOTEK’s professional video management software, VAST, making cameras more powerful and increasing management efficiency. Towards formulating an all-inclusive IP surveillance solution, the team met with pertinent personnel of the company and with their assistance, they conducted a survey of areas within the plant with no network connectivity and suggested establishing network connections accordingly. After analyzing the situation, the solutions were deployed covering all boundary walls, loading and unloading areas and other critical areas. Post deployment, the entire commissioning was verified and a user level training was also conducted. The deployment of VIVOTEK IP surveillance solutions transformed the operational scenario into a more productive and secured one. The installation brought down the cases of thefts, and the workers and operation staff became more alert and disciplined towards the jobs. “VIVOTEK’s IP surveillance system worked with us step by step to not only provide the robust security solution we were looking for, but also helped us navigate through all our key plant requirements. The IP surveillance system has significantly improved the control over the entire production process and administrative areas of all our production facilities. The solution enables an efficient and centralized security through which the manager can monitor remotely anytime and anywhere promptly and effectively. VIVOTEK has been really helpful during the planning stage and in providing technical support, which exceeded our expectations, and we’re looking forward to providing them with more as their business expands,” said, Johnson Cherian, G.M. (IT Infrastructure) Varun Beverages Ltd.

Protects Western India Campuses The Directorate of Technical Education (DTE), Government of Gujarat, is now using Hikvision IP product and VMS to protect and administer education facilities and services across Western India. A government organisation that provides qualitative and higher level technical training for students from a diverse mix of financial and social backgrounds, the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE) aims to deliver global standards of excellence in technical education for all of its students. Background Looking to provide a more secure environment and enhance education management both inside its college campuses and within classrooms, DTE invited Progility Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (A local partner of Prama Hikvision India) to evaluate their needs and recommend a practical solution. Working closely with the client, Progility team undertook site surveys at 43 campuses across Gujarat and in respect of DTE’s management and system performance needs, proposed a cost-effective solution that would provide the required level of indoor and outdoor surveillance coverage. The considerations also included enhancing the day-to-day education processes, where the system could remotely monitor examinations, as well as being a time-saving facility management tool for use across the large Western India state. Integrated network Aiming centralised remote surveillance and alarm monitoring, Hikvision proposed an IP based solution that would use DTE’s existing secure virtual private network (VPN), which connects all education sites across Gujarat to a central point at the Directorate of Technical Education, in the capital city of Gandhinagar, Gujarat. At two control rooms, Hikvision iVMS-5200 Professional VMS software was installed to control and monitor the new surveillance system 24/7. Ideal for controlling any mix of surveillance system products, the iVMS-5200 Professional software fully supports all Hikvision products including DVRs, NVRs, cameras and speed domes, as well as any mix of third party manufacturer products that conform to ONVIF standard. Regardless of its size and complexity, the Hikvision control software fully supports the installed Hikvision products’ smart features, including smart search, playback, and smart detection. To provide affordable high-quality surveillance imaging across the 43 college campuses, a mix of DS-2CD2620F-IS HD 2 Megapixel vari-focal IR network bullet, and DS-2CD2720F-IS HD 2 Megapixel outdoor network IR dome cameras were specified. Both camera models provide 1920×1080 resolution, and true day/ night (ICR) low-light capabilities, along with back-light compensation (BLC). Approximately 1,300 Hikvision cameras installed now provide comprehensive surveillance within the campuses lobbies, classrooms, laboratories, staff rooms, examination halls, auditoriums, storerooms, exit and entry doors, and open campus area access gates and car parks. “The Hikvision IP based surveillance solution successfully illustrates just what can be achieved with large-scale integration,” explains Pinkal Shah, Asst. Manager – Technical Support, Prama Hikvision India, “The Hikvision iVMS-5200 Professional VMS software enables 43 campus locations to be monitored easily and reliably, encompassing central video management, integration and fail-over mechanism. Supporting all remote sites’ local storage and camera SD storage, the system uses Hikvision’s Center Video Record (CVR) mode using NAS to receive data streams directly from network cameras. With CVR mode, there is no need for an intermediate storage server, which not only increases storage efficiency and system stability, but also greatly reduces system hardware cost for the end-user.” Benefits “The Hikvision video surveillance system utilises a WAN/ VPN to connect each of the locations in this massive multi-site project,” explains Dayashankar of Progility Technologies Pvt. Ltd., systems integrator for the installation of the project; “The excellent Hikvision iVMS-5200 Professional VMS software enabled us to integrate many existing third party cameras into the new system, as well as providing out of office hours remote alarm configuration and monitoring. We found the quality of the Hikvision networked camera images to be exceptional under every operating condition.” Viewed from the central monitoring stations, DTE system operators can now remotely check the status of facilities or presence/ absence of support staff across Western India. In addition, on examination of the high definition play back, since the installation went live, incidents of petty theft have been recorded, and stolen belongings of students and facilities recovered.