Exacq hits the market with Integral vets
DVR manufacturer stresses customer involvement with product development

By L. Samuel Pfeifle, editor

INDIANAPOLIS--In the year since Exacq Technologies entered the market with its first product, the Exacq eDVR component board, the company has moved from offering a pure hardware solution for OEMs to manufacturing its own network DVR to, in December, releasing a pure software product that manages an all-IP camera surveillance network. It's all part of the company's plans to migrate users from an analog environment to a digital and IP-based environment.

If anyone knows DVRs, it's the team running Exacq. President David Underwood, director of engineering Daniel Rittman, director of application software Jerome Fath, director of operations Jeffrey Walters, and director of sales and marketing Thomas Buckley all hail from Integral Technologies, the DVR pioneer sold to Balfour Beatty's Andover Controls in 2002 and again to Schneider Electric in 2004.

"Integral was one of the first three companies to do DVRs," said Underwood. "You know how well that business has developed. Now you see the emergence of IT technology in the security surveillance and recording market ... Our strategy is to migrate both the integrator and the investment into new technology."

Hence the coexistence of exacqVision Pro and the brand-new exacqVision IP. The former is a network DVR, like a normal DVR but easily scalable and networkable. The latter is just a piece of software, turning any PC into a video management system that can control a number of IP cameras. Both have essentially the same interface.

It's an interface with which Scott Hard, vice president and general manager of BankPak, working exclusively in the bank-branch market out of an office in Morrison, Tenn., has had great success. "It just blew other products out of the water," he said, without a moment's hesitation.

This is partly because Exacq essentially gave BankPak the keys to the DVR. Hard said manufacturers weren't meeting the needs of financial institutions and when he heard Exacq was coming into the market he contacted them. "They allowed us to have actual input into the features," he said. "They told us to write up a wish list, along with a couple of other dealers."

Thomas Buckley, Exacq's director of sales and marketing, said this close work with mid-tier integrators is part of the plan to constantly be communicating back and forth to develop products that work specifically for different verticals.

For example, Brad Kelley, BankPak's installation manager, said, "with a lot of the other units we've installed in the past, the remote software has always been problematic to install. With Exacq, it installs in under 10 seconds. The ease of use is just so key to making our customers happy. It's a real good selling point for us."


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