Cathexis (www.cathexis.co.za) is located in Umhlanga and while many may not have heard of this company before, the recent history of Intervid is still fresh in our minds. Intervid, which initially was a very successful company, overstretched itself by expanding into the UK, and with a huge debt on its books it was eventually rescued by VenFin, which now holds all the equity.
VenFin separated out Intervid Technologies from the rest of the company and all the backroom boys are now part of a company called Cathexis (from the Greek word 'kathexis' meaning 'focused thought' or 'concentration of energy on an object or idea').
Cathexis (which was previously independent and was acquired by Intervid in 2000) now holds all the intellectual property of the previous Intervid, and has the freedom to sell its products and ideas to other companies and to appoint its own distributors to the market as a whole. It is in fact important to quote its mission statement, which reads: 'To be recognised and respected within the surveillance market as a supplier of product technology and knowledge that empowers our channel partners to offer holistic solutions'. Cathexis has already established a distributor in the UK - Acam Technology - and it is already active in this field with a large customer base. Cathexis believes that it will provide innovative technology products to Acam and that these could even be sold to its existing customer base. Other distributors, or channel partners, have been established throughout Europe, North America and other countries. Intervid companies in North America, South Africa, Australia and Dubai are also certified systems integrators.
To establish its own identity Cathexis has developed a standard range of security products that are named after African cats. This standard line will be upgraded and expanded later. Taking just three of these products, the Serval is the smallest product and represents the baby of the product line. The Caracal is intended for more advanced integrated systems applications, while the Cheetah represents the pinnacle of current development.
The Serval is a cost-effective, entry-level solution, and provides an affordable solution to digital surveillance. At the same time being based on the same powerful processing platform as more advanced products, it can be upgraded to a highly sophisticated digital surveillance system. In principle, the Serval replaces 12 analogue time-lapse VCRs with a low cost digital solution. The system can easily be upgraded to 24 channels. Video compression for storage is achieved using the JPEG algorithm running on a PC platform. The Serval system software is called the catLite package and the software is said to be particularly user-friendly. Free software is provided for Microsoft Windows remote viewing and operation, while the system has automated diagnostics and detailed reporting. Various options are available for the Serval, which can for example, use four hard drives with as much as 1 TB of storage capacity. Target applications for the Serval are standalone applications and enterprises with many small sites that need to be centrally-monitored.
The Caracal is a robust and flexible digital surveillance system suitable for a wide range of applications. It is a scaleable system, optimised for 20 cameras, with wavelength compression. Performance of 200 fps is possible with NTSC, this increasing to 240 fps when used with PAL. Video compression is achieved with the wavelet algorithm implemented in hardware for fast and efficient event recording. The Caracal will integrate with third party products such as ATM terminals through to access control and automatic licence-plate recognition systems, and the product enables index-based recording. The Caracal software is the catPro professional package. Its powerful database engine provides flexible field recording options together with rapid search and retrieval. It also offers incident search capability on recorded material with activity detection. As with the Serval a large number of options are available for this product.
The Cheetah represents the peak of current development and includes the best that Cathexis has to offer. Capable of realtime recording and monitoring from every video camera, synchronised video and audio recording with MPEG-2 efficiency, this system leads the world market. The maximum recording speeds are 1000 fields per second (PAL) and 1200 fields per second (NTSC). Video input channels range from 4 to 20. The compression algorithm is MPEG-2. Hardware features include two RS232 ports and two front-panel USB device interfaces. Storage capacity in standard form is up to 1,6 TB. In terms of software it uses the fully-featured catPro; it can be integrated with third party systems and has a simple upgrade to catSite site manager or catAlarm central alarm management software.
Besides the core recording systems, the standard brochure contains a large number of ancillary devices and software including catAlarm, catMap, catTracker, catFiler, cat Counter and several other software options, with free modules including catViewer, catPlayer and catAPI. The first two are software products and the latter is the ActiveX application programming interface. The CatVision software is continuously being developed and improved and many new features are released on a virtually weekly basis.
While catAlarm incorporates the catPro and catSite functions, it adds the centralised alarm management and client-monitoring capability of a large control room, enabling operators to respond to a prioritised alarm queue, and has alarm calls, recordings and information written to an SQL database. catAlarm offers, full, prioritised incoming call management; alarms are archived with recordings and associated alarm data such as operator comments, custom alarm procedures, contacts and operating comments per alarming site, plus a host of other features are available. catMap also offers an intuitive graphical display and control of resources.
Mark Taylor, the current CEO of Intervid, does seem to have his thinking cap properly on. Through Cathexis (with managing director Dr Clive Putman), the company can enter any market in the world using distributors (who cost nothing unless they make sales, so that they are incentified), instead of using the previous Intervid strategy of entering markets through the expensive purchase of an existing business. Intervid still has the opportunity to grow strongly by providing solutions in this country and the rest of Africa. Cathexis has a potential market size which is at least an order of magnitude greater than when it just supplied Intervid, and cash problems (if they do arise) can easily be handled by VenFin itself. Cathexis certainly has a bright future ahead.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version