City of Manchester opts for Genetec's Omnicast in major system upgradePublished on 15 May 2008  Genetec announced recently that the City of Manchester has selected Omnicast 4.1 for a major system upgrade project. With approximately 700 analogue cameras spread throughout the city, Manchester is gradually migrating to IP, and all cameras will eventually be managed by the IP platform.
Working with C-ways Limited, a UK-based IT Integrator, Omnicast was selected for the flexibility and benefits offered by its new Federation feature. "Where before we could only use either unicast or multicast functions, the Federation will allow us to use both those functionalities simultaneously, offering better management of bandwidth," claims Mr. David Walsh, Technical Installations Manager from the City of Manchester's Command and Control Centre. With five control centres located throughout the city to manage video from their older fixed analogue systems, the Federation is also able to reroute all video back to one central monitoring station through IP. As each system is progressively migrated and rerouted back to the central monitoring station, there will no longer be a need for the other control centres, thus contributing to significantly reduced operation costs. Additionally, total flexibility of the system has given them the freedom to work with their existing infrastructure and any hardware providers they deem fit. According to Mr. Walsh, "this is very important when spending public money." One month into the implementation of the Omnicast system, and the city has already migrated 30 cameras from the Greater Manchester Police and 20 cameras from its largest municipal park over to the Omnicast platform. According to Mr. Walsh: "Unlike an analogue installation, the systems were up and running within hours and our partners could not be happier with the new system and its many benefits." Although in initial installation stages, the City of Manchester has plans to continue populating the Omnicast platform with existing cameras and is also looking into third-party integration with video and audio analytics partners. Genetec is pleased that initial implementations are going smoothly and the system is offering the people of Manchester exactly what they needed. "Our development process has ensured that customers such as the City of Manchester will benefit from everything innovative security technology has to offer and we are glad to be a part of providing it," claims Cavan Kendall, UK Sales Manager at Genetec. | 
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