Steamboat Springs School District

“You can become successful using Verkada’s complete system if you have 10 minutes worth of your time.”

— Tim Miles, Technology Director

Background

Three hours from any major metropolitan city, the destination-resort locale of Steamboat Springs, Colorado is home to one of the top school districts in the state. Steamboat Springs School District provides broad and diverse experiential learning opportunities that are inclusive, personalized and motivating. Its success is facilitated by highly effective and passionate educators, engaged families, state of the art infrastructure and meaningful community investment.

The rural school district’s security camera system was approximately 12 years old and its Technology Director, Tim Miles, recognized that it was time for a refresh.

Challenges

The bandwidth requirements of the legacy video surveillance system at Steamboat Springs School District was a source of particular of concern. As Tim began his search for an upgraded solution, he found that the other, similar systems on the market weren’t able to offer an adequate fix for this issue—or decrease complexity. Many of them also came with a need to buy additional hardware. “When I was looking at a traditional system, I may have had to upgrade switches and create new routes, purchase a separate WAN…I was really worried about all of that.”

Why Verkada?

“What was keeping me up at night was, am I going to overflow this WAN and affect people’s day to day internet-based usage with this video traffic? But once I saw the Verkada solution, you don’t need to worry.”

When the school district’s old system was installed, many advanced features weren’t even a possibility. Tim notes, “I remember telling the salesperson that this would be the hardest sale you’ve ever had because I’ve had this product for 10-plus years now and it’s been excellent.” But, as he discovered during his search for the right replacement, today’s leading video security solutions (like Verkada) provide modern functionality—such as remote monitoring and management, and the ability to search through clips by date and time to find footage—without consuming the level of bandwidth required by many traditional systems.

Recalling his first look at Verkada, Tim says, “I saw the back-end side of the system. The search ability to find an incident in the video. And I didn’t have to have servers. How easy it was to add users; it was just exceptional.” He also remarks that, when compared to the RFPs he received back from other vendors, Verkada’s solution was refreshing.

The Results

For Steamboat Springs School District, Verkada’s slim bandwidth footprint (and the associated impact it has on network traffic) was a big plus. Additionally, Tim found the accessibility of Verkada’s solution to be a major improvement over the district’s legacy system. “Outside access is a must in cameras today, where it wasn’t 12 years ago. Not just to a camera, but to all cameras.”

In just the first week after the Verkada cameras were installed, Tim remarks that the impact was, “tremendous, because it’s so simple to use. So now, anybody can use it. You can add any user, give them any rights within seconds—versus minutes and hours of setup time in traditional cameras.”