How OpenEye Helped the University of Idaho Streamline Campus Security

Improve Incident Response With Surveillance Built for Schools

Join Steve Mills and Bruce Lovell from the University of Idaho as they discuss how OpenEye Web Services (OWS) streamlines their approach to campus surveillance, exploring why reliability and scalability are at the heart of their security strategy.

Transcript

The University of Idaho is an open campus, so physical security, first and foremost, means a monumental challenge.

My name is Steve Mills, and I’m the Executive Director of the Office of Public Safety, Security, and Parking for the University of Idaho.

A camera system is multiple eyes, or in this case, multiple OpenEyes, that allow us to focus on areas of our campus that we just can’t physically see all the time.

I’m Bruce Lovell, and I am the Director of Physical Security at the University of Idaho.

One of the first things to come to mind with regard to how OpenEye has improved our ability in public safety is at our emergency operations center. Without reliable cameras, our off-site emergency operations center is blind. With all the guests and visitors that we have, a key piece to mitigating any threats or risks is to have a functioning system, and OpenEye supports us by having a reliable system.

It gives us ability. In a simple word, it gives us ability. It gives us scaleability. We can expand the program. We can modify the program. We can enhance the program.

It gives us that marketability. When I sit in front of students and their parents and I talk about the security platforms that we offer, our ability to capture relevant video data gives a real measure of comfort, both to us and to the parents.

And then the final ability is reliability. We know your product’s good. We know the company stands behind it.

So they’re constantly trying to stay on the cutting edge of not just video software, but how they can integrate and how they can help the institutions they partner with.

OpenEye is the ideal solution. A good solution means it meets the needs now. The best solution means it’s the best of what we looked at. Ideal means it meets our needs now, it meets our needs in the future, and I can reach it now.

So that’s what I look for in a security system. That’s what I look for in a partnership for cameras. That’s what I look for, and that’s what OpenEye provided, and it became, and it remains to this day, the ideal solution for us and for our future growth.