Comtrak hired Saeed in 2006 to head the development of its next generation Video Surveillance System. Comtrak at the time was a subsidiary of ESCO Technologies (NYSE: ESE), which itself was a spinoff of Emerson Electric (NYSE: EMR). The project, at the time Saeed was hired, was two (2) years behind, and the team was reduced to just a couple of developers while the rest of the team members had exited the firm.
Saeed’s first task was to work with the vendor management to diversify Comtrak’s supplier base resulting in a wider net for quality resources and 30% reduction in contractor cost. The team was scaled to 50+ development resources in record time. Saeed provided team leadership and served as a chief architect of the entire software system that was designed to control up to 10,000 DVRs and 200,000 cameras, both analog and IP, spread across different geographic locations. The system was essentially the IoT of video surveillance before the term IoT was even coined. The software running on each DVR, which was essentially a single core processor with just 4 GBs of memory, would capture images from up to 20 channels concurrently at the rate of 120 images per second, which meant performance requirement of image capture, encoding, digitally signing and storing of an image in just 8.33 milliseconds. Other features included Image recognition, movement detection in vaults, video tagging during ATM operations, and many others.
The headend allowed for central management of DVRs with many features such as detection of a camera going out of sync, on any of the 20,000 DVRs and user being alerted in under 2 seconds.
Most Significant Achievements:
The system, developed and deployed at BoA (largest client of Comtrak) was the world’s largest centrally managed video surveillance system in the world that also did not require a dedicated video network at client like competitor’s products.
