Member Article

Sunday Times Fast Track firm helps historic Beamish Hall find new vision with cutting-edge technology

Seaham-based CCTV specialist Hadrian Technology has helped the North East’s historic Beamish Hall Country House Hotel to revamp its outdated CCTV through the use of cutting edge technology. The replacement of the Best Western hotel’s old analogue CCTV system has resulted in a significant return on investment and taken considerably less time and disruption to install than the original system.

The complex repair job was initially refused by a number of CCTV companies before the hotel management team were referred to Hadrian Technology, one of the UK’s leading CCTV security design, supply and installation companies, on a recommendation.

The company was recently named in both the Sunday Times Virgin Fast Track 100 league table of the UK’s fastest growing companies and The Financial Times’ inaugural ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing businesses – the FT 1000.

By cleverly converting digital camera signals and allowing them to run over previously installed co-axial cables before decoding the signals at the other end, Hadrian Technology was able to transform the camera system from analogue to one of the most advanced, high-definition digital offerings on the market in only a matter of weeks.

The new technology now supports 74 existing cameras, as well as the addition of several HD cameras. Its introduction prevented the disruption of ripping out and replacing approximately 20 miles of cabling at a cost of thousands of pounds. In addition, the future-proofed system enables the hotel to phase in additional high definition cameras and continue to upgrade their systems over time, in an affordable way, something that would have previously been impossible to achieve.

The upgrade is already providing a significant return on investment in saved staff time alone. Previously staff would have had to manually search hours of footage to find an incident. With a new user-friendly operating system from security solutions provider Avigilon, staff now have access to high definition images, advanced search functions and remote viewing that can be accessed via a laptop, mobile or tablet. Incidents can be easily bookmarked, allowing users to create incident files that can be exported as encrypted files should these need to be shared, whilst a self-learning function and the ability to create active zones of monitoring, allow staff to train the system to recognise specific objects from people to cars.

The cameras also have the ability to utilise infrared technology, or ‘night vision’ to capture clear video in areas of complete darkness.

Chris Comerford, Beamish Hall’s General Manager says: “Previously we had three separate systems installed, meaning there were three drives to look through to find just one incident – it could take a whole day. If you were looking for one, five-second incident you could be watching for 2 hours before coming across it.

“With the new system it takes 10 minutes. It’s great for me, and the rest of the staff – it saves time and allows us to get on with the job we are paid to do.”

Hadrian Technology’s business development manager, Chris Stott says: “We weren’t surprised we were the first company who had agreed to take on the job. It looked incredibly complex on first assessment. The original map of cameras we were provided proved to be very out of date - cameras and wires were incorrectly labelled, whilst some cameras had their own power source and others didn’t.

“We had worked on a similar job previously at Hardwick Hall but we had no idea whether the same technique – setting digital camera signals to run over the original network cables – would work at Beamish as the length of wiring was far greater than anything we had ever worked with previously.

“To rewire the building would have been a mammoth task. By using the new technology developed with our partners Videcon, we were able to save the hotel significant costs as well limiting the disruption and time that would have been required.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by John Rodgers .