Interview with Lindsay Hiebert, senior marketing manager for emerging technologies at Cisco

How has Cisco been involved in the physical security and loss prevention space?

Cisco’s involvement in the physical security market has grown significantly over the last three years and we’ve followed a clear strategy to lead the industry transformation of physical security technologies to open standards IP-based, interoperable solutions that are easier to deploy, maintain, and extend, and allow organizations to take advantage of IT innovations and applications.

To accomplish this we support worldwide training and certification of 250+ Authorized Technology Partners (ATP partners) to deliver end-to-end network-centric solutions to customers.  Cisco also supports and develops a community of 60+ technology eco-system partners who provide additional integrated capabilities to further extend, support or customize an end-to-end solution. Examples of these eco-system technology partners include Agilence, which makes the Hawkeye solution for POS Video Auditing, Scopix for retail store operations, Object Video, and others for video analytics.

How are advances in video surveillance and POS technologies affecting loss prevention?

New technologies enable the delivery of video over the network more transparently and cost-effectively, independent of video format, device, or bandwidth, and provide improved interoperability across networks (medianets) and applications.   The outcome of these networking and technology developments translates into new applications and capabilities with improved end user experiences for customers.

The Agilence Hawkeye POS Video Auditing solution is a good example of a technology that leverages Cisco’s IP-based video surveillance network to significantly reduce shrink. Hawkeye marries keystroke and scanner activity at the point of sale to its associated video. Users can query cash register activity for suspicious events or errors and step through those events line by line and frame by frame so that they can understand what has happened at the POS. Leveraging Cisco’s strength in networking, they can perform that type of analysis across stores, identifying recurring behaviors like Organized Retail Crime or operational errors.

Improvements in networking, video analytics, imaging technologies, high definition video, and open standards are continuing to evolve quickly and will continue to bring innovative solutions for loss prevention and POS applications.

What’s the biggest challenge the physical security industry is facing?

The physical security industry is very fragmented, and the lack of widely adopted industry standards and interoperability among best of breed point products, applications, systems and devices continues to be an issue.  The shift of the value chain across the industry to make the transition to IP-based systems is one of the largest challenges. In order to move to the next generation of networked systems across the industry, this process will have to include manufacturers, suppliers, systems integrators, consultants, and customers.

What do retailers in particular need to think about when deploying technology for loss prevention?

There are four main areas retailers need to address when considering technologies: 1) Business objectives, metrics, and return on investment; 2) impact on the customer in-store experience; 3) innovation; 4) flexibility of the solution in terms of architecture and integration with other enterprise retail operations; 5) proven quality and performance of the solution (how effective is it? how well does it support open standards? how easy is it to use and manage?).