Back from bankruptcy, Steelbox releases new VMS

ALPHARETTA, Ga.—After flying under the radar for a few years following its bankruptcy and subsequent acquisition, Steelbox has re-emerged with a new and expanded catalog of products.

The company, now a division of Alpharetta, Ga.-based Adtech Global Solutions, recently released a new video management system, dubbed SteelVision, which integrates seamlessly with its existing video-switching, encoding and storage equipment. Adtech obtained the VMS technology behind SteelVision in the April 2010 acquisition of Telindus Surveillance Solutions.

While SteelVision is the company's newest offering, the “engine under the hood” is still SteelSwitch, Nik Moissiadis, Steelbox's president, told Security Systems News' sister publication, Security Director News. SteelSwitch is a piece of video-switching equipment designed to take the place of NVRs that aggregates digital and analog video and distribute it to end users while managing bandwidth usage in such a way so that video is not lost during high-traffic times, such as an emergency.

Adding a VMS to the mix will strengthen the company by allowing it to provide a complete end-to-end IP-video surveillance solution as opposed to its products being used as a part of a larger system that in the past hasn't always been able to take advantage of SteelSwitch's full capabilities, according to Moissiadis. “Because it is our product, we make sure SteelVision and SteelSwitch are fully integrated,” he said.

The new announcement was not a surprise to industry watchers. “Since the bankruptcy and later acquisition by Adtech, I along with many other industry watchers have been waiting for Steelbox to re-emerge better, faster and stronger,” Steve Hunt, a security industry analyst and CEO of Hunt Business Intelligence, told SDN. But he's not sold from the press release. “I'm still waiting for evidence of that.”