Management

Happy Birthday!

Geutebruck Turns 40

28.09.2010 - There is good reason to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of Geutebruck, the German video security system producer. The company has grown literally from a garage busin...

There is good reason to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the founding of Geutebruck, the German video security system producer. The company has grown literally from a garage business into a major international player in the security world. A look at the company‘s philosophy highlights why it has been so successful and paves the way forward to the next anniversary.

40 years ago this year, Geutebruck began life in a garage on the bank of the River Rhine. Thomas Geutebrück set up a mail order business selling Japanese car radios and hi-fi amplifiers. One day he had a visit from two gentlemen from the German criminal investigation department. It was the era of the Baader Meinhof Group and the Red Army Faction and bank robberies were on the up, so they were looking for some means of taking photographs to identify culprits. There was clearly a ready market; contemporary video recorders were simply not up to the job, so Thomas decided to design a special film camera for the purpose. His camera was unconventional. It was much simpler to make and cheaper to buy and to use than anything produced by trained photographic camera developers. It transported the film with rubber rollers, so perforations weren't needed and less film was required. The camera was a run-away success and came to dominate the market, not just in Germany but right round the world with updated versions of it in production until 2005.


Fortunately for many of the high security sites, prestigious buildings and important organisations across Europe and round the world which are now protected by Geutebruck video security systems, Thomas Geutebrück did not rest on his laurels. His garage-based enterprise flourished and grew, first into a CCTV manufacturer with a strong emphasis on R&D and innovation, then into a digital video security company with an international reputation for quality. Now under the direction of his daughter Katharina, it has developed its IT skills to levels normally only achieved by the top IT specialists; it boasts a 35 million Euro annual turnover and sales partners in 40 countries. 


Katharina Geutebrück, daughter of the company's founder and present managing director, thinks this 40th anniversary is not just a good excuse for a celebration but also carries with it a relevant message for today's prospective security buyers. "In a fast-moving world," she contends, "continuity and stability are important factors in building trust. And with the complexity of today's technology, pure feature-plus-function-based decisions become more and more difficult for users to make, so trust has an increasing part to play. Finding a partner you can trust to provide a solution that fits, and that will adapt and still perform after years of use is increasingly important."


"From our 40 years in the business," she continues, "we hope customers will see that we are a company which builds long term relationships and is here for the duration. We invest a great deal in backwards compatibility to allow our users to benefit from future developments even years after their original investment decision. This is one of our strengths, and it is a persuasive factor for knowledgeable users who have had experience with other manufacturers with product strategies based on high volume and short-term gain."


What Are the Secrets of Geutebruck's Success?
There at least two key factors which have worked greatly to Geutebruck's advantage over the years. The first is its product philosophy of compatibility, openness and integration. All Geutebruck systems are fully compatible with each other, and in contrast to many of its competitors, the company provides free software development kits which allow for an open interface policy and the integration of different types of system. This provides significant added value for the user, and that, in the long run is good for Geutebruck too.


The second of its secrets is the single-minded pursuit of solutions which meet customers' needs. When Katharina Geutebrück says provocatively with tongue in cheek, that the company's customers don't necessarily get what they want, they get what they need, she is not being arrogant, but rather acknowledging both the high priority given to understanding the user's needs, and the company's free-thinking nature. It is an admission that when the company's high levels of technical expertise are applied to detailed user needs, sometimes the resulting optimal technical solution is not quite what the customer might expect. A factor here being that Geutebruck is not given to blindly following the latest technical fashion in the market. Its financial independence leaves it free to question each new trend for technical benefits and sustainability, and free to exercise its professional judgement. - H.264 for instance is a case in point.


Despite the apparent popularity of H.264, Geutebruck has stuck with its own CCTV-oriented compression format called MPEG4CCTV. Lack of CCTV awareness and inherent drawbacks have been cited as reasons for the company's rejection of H.264 in its basic standard. "We want to offer our customers something better," explains Katharina Geutebrück. "So we are producing our own encoding format called H.264 CCTV combining the advantages of high compression factors and CCTV-aware functionality, low latencies, high operational convenience, precise event management etc. And with the new multi-standard operating software we've developed customers won't be tied to one particular format, they'll be able to choose the best encoding for each project requirement - even down to event-controlled selection of the compression format during recording. But that's something to look out for at ‘Security' in Essen!"