Video and Access Security for University of Massachusetts Amherst

Salient Systems has announced that UMass Amherst, the flagship campus of the University of Massachusetts system, has standardized its video surveillance operations on the Salient CompleteView Video Management Platform, enabling campus security and safety staff to protect the campus population of 32,000 with a 24/7 view of its video surveillance and integrated access control operations.

Using CompleteView, UMass Amherst is centrally monitoring its network of nearly 1,700 IP cameras and legacy analog cameras safeguarding the 51 residence halls and 225 buildings that make up the campus environment. With 1,500 acres of ground to cover, UMass Amherst wanted to optimize its video system - and the corresponding integrations available through CompleteView - to enable security and safety staff to remotely assess a situation or diagnose an alarm from the school’s access control platform, the Tyco Software House Ccure 9000 from Johnson Controls.

“The ability to ascertain why an alert was occurring without having to deploy resources to drive across campus to visually assess a situation is huge,” according to Jim Meade, residence hall security manager for the UMass Amherst Police Department. For example, a residence hall door near a bus stop frequently experiences alarms in cold or rainy weather because people are standing inside the doorway to keep warm and continuously open the door to check for the bus. “This is when the video saved us time and resources in investigations when it was actually a non-alarm.”

Video feeds and intrusion detection alarms are fed to the UMass Amherst Police Department for real-time monitoring and response using CompleteView VMS, which provides the capability to add more high-resolution cameras as surveillance needs change and grow, including two new buildings slated to be added to the video network. Because the university maintains a decentralized video recording approach, where all video is stored locally, CompleteView’s Dynamic Resolution Scaling feature preserves network bandwidth availability when live or recording video is pulled by other video users and transferred to other locations for investigation.

“We were very pleased to have provided UMass Amherst with a future-proofed migration path as they move from analog to an IP infrastructure,” said Jay Mele, vice president of sales, Salient Systems. “Leveraging CompleteView’s open platform approach, the university is well-positioned to easily add high-resolution cameras or a variety of other integrations to their security system now and in the years to come.”