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Case Study: The ROI of Digital Video Surveillance

Allen Rude, security manager at Intel, invested more than four years in an ROI study to justify the cost of digital video surveillance

Rude also met resistance from his own executives, many of whom thought a camera's a camera's a camera. Rude had to show how the quality of images drastically improved from analog to digital and, what's more, could be tuned on the fly so that the camera kicks into high-resolution during an event.

His point was made for him several times over when Intel was able to catch bad guys and resolve incidents based on high-quality visual evidence stored in the DVRs—visuals the old system couldn't have captured.

Finally, the system's worth was showing itself, and the market was cooperating, too, as equipment prices slowly, surely declined. "We've finally, just now, gotten to the point where we can show a break-even, and maybe even a slightly positive ROI," says Rude. "It was a massive effort, but we got funded."

Postscript: DVRs on the Edge

A new trend in digital video surveillance puts a DVR out on the edge. Rude says the benefits look tremendous. "Rather than running fiber from the cameras back to a cluster of PCs with video boards connected to a big DVR array, the DVR sits out there with the camera. So if you lose a DVR, you lose only one camera. We can also use off-the-shelf IT equipment with this new generation." Of course, Rude says, "We've got to see if it saves us money too." Just as he's finishing deploying DVRs, he's starting the ROI process again with the next next big thing.