Tear Down This Video Wall?Tear Down This Video Wall?

Jupiter Systems has been building out NOC video walls for three decades. Now they want to put those walls into users' pockets.

If there's one application that would seem, by its nature, unsuited to remote access, it's the Video Wall. As in, the wall of giant video screens you see in Network Operations Centers (NOC) and similar command/control operations. After all, the whole idea there is that everyone is together in one room, looking at the same big screens at the same time, everyone working on the same overarching task, be it keeping a network up and running or keeping astronauts safely traveling through space.

For 20 years, Jupiter Systems has been creating these video walls for customers ranging from electrical power generators; government agencies at the municipal, state, and county level managing road traffic; security providers; enterprises including factories, and others monitoring supply chains. Jupiter has tens of thousands of installations around world, 40% of them in North America.

I had a chance to talk with Brady Bruce, VP of marketing and strategic alliances at Jupiter Systems, who explained that a few years back, he started asking customers: Is there anyone who needs to see this stuff on that wall who can't be here today? "The answer was almost always yes," he said.

"What this really became was the business of expanding the reach of visual intelligence," Brady added.

This need to expand the circle of collaboration outside of the NOC and beyond the video wall led Jupiter to develop Canvas, a platform for sharing the feeds from the video wall with mobile devices and PCs located remote from the operations center. It's intended to let those in the operations center, collaborate more effectively with the individuals on the front line who may be affected by the data and video--with the resulting alerts and alarms--that the operations center video wall is displaying

A case in point that Brady described was a Jupiter Systems customer, a Fortune 500 biotech company that has its headquarters in the US and 19 factories around the world. The automated production lines that package the medicines have to be very carefully calibrated to ensure that the medicines come off the lines precisely as they're supposed to--the right proportions, amounts, etc.

Even a minor seismic event near one of these factories coudl threaten to throw off these calibrations, so it's critical to react immediately to such an event, a reaction that usually involves collaboration between the HQ and the factory. This may require telemetry, or it may be something as simple as pointing a smartphone or tablet camera at something and sharing the video.

Brady Bruce says that this type of enterprise is among the best candidates for Canvas--"networks with large numbers of cameras pointed at things."

Here's a diagram of how Canvas fits into the overall architecture:

The idea is for Canvas to integrate with communications platforms like Lync or Cisco or Avaya, Brady said: "Those platforms have an enormous amount of intelligence built into them. What we're working toward is being a good partner on those platforms."

And while NOCs and video walls aren't going away, Brady Bruce said it's clear that they can't be the only answer for those charged with continuous monitoring of enterprise systems. He said more and more companies that Jupiter works with are saying, "I don't really need a video wall, but I need that visual information, camera feeds, real-time data stream, on a bunch of mobile devices."

The old paradigm of everyone together in the same room "was more a failure of imagination than a strict requirement that we stand shouldner to shoulder," he said. Canvas has been "a recognition that they all have remote workers. That's simply a reality."

"The move has been to defocus on the central video wall, and this is really about putting a video wall in your pocket, or on your laptop," Brady concluded.

Jupiter will be showing off Canvas at Enterprise Connect Orlando 2014

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