A moving solution. (Working Wise).

While other local workers are asleep, the 35 movers at office moving company East Coast Relocation are busy dismantling cubicles, packing up conference rooms, and boxing the rest of the office's paraphernalia They bring the items back to East Coast's warehouse in Fairfield, New Jersey, to await delivery to the new location.

A lot of furniture and equipment ends up on the loading dock when the company s many trucks are emptied. It would be impossible for John Stuono, East Coast's owner, to keep watch over this round-the-clock activity without some help.

But since last year, Stuono's been able to keep an eye on his business whenever he wants and from wherever he chooses--even, he jokes, on his laptop from inside his Jacuzzi. That's because images from the four cameras that monitor East Coast's loading dock, warehouse, time clock, and parking area are sent in real time across the Internet. After logging on to a special Web site, it's just like I'm sitting at my desk," he says. "I can switch between cameras and check my camera archive."

Rather than being sent to a company site, as is the norm, the video at East Coast Relocation is transmitted to a third-party server under a service agreement with BroadWare Technologies. The current video is available for viewing at Stuono's convenience, as are archived videos. The company pays a monthly subscriber fee, but it avoided the costs of buying and maintaining expensive hardware for video storage.

Stuono began using Broad Ware Technologies' Remote Video Access subscription service last year after deciding to upgrade his surveillance system from one camera hooked to a monitor to four cameras spread throughout the facility. The cost of buying and setting up everything himself was prohibitive, so T&R Alarm Systems, his alarm dealer, recommended the Remote Video Access application, which provides access to live video streams and video archives with a simple user interface.

Thomas A. Sansone, president of T&R, said that he discovered Broad Ware through a sales representative he knew who moved to that company from a CCTV company that T&R had worked with previously. Sansone says that he set up the technology in his own company to evaluate it before recommending it to his customers.

T&R set up the four cameras around Stuono's facility. Right now, all are fixed, though Stuono says he may upgrade them to pan/tilt/zoom in the future. He worked with the company's Internet provider to reprogram the firewall and router on Stuono's SDSL (symmetric digital subscriber line, which provides high-speed uploading and downloading over shorthaul connections) to accommodate the cameras' IP addresses. Stuono's computers need only be Java enabled and have Internet Explorer 5.5 or higher installed for him to access his video.

BroadWare's vice president of marketing, Ray Kaupp, explains that Stuono's video data is stored by another company (called a colocation facility) that offers a level of security much greater than what small companies like East Coast Relocation could afford. "The cost of replicating this themselves would be extremely high," he says. "You're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software and the infrastructure to support this application. That doesn't make sense to a small business."

The video monitoring has paid off, in one case helping his business avert a disaster. Stuono had sent a team to pick up furniture from a site in Maryland. The customer later reported that a printer and a microfiche machine were missing. The warehouse workers and those who did the move pointed fingers at each other.

Stuono logged in to his account and pulled up archived video from the loading dock. "I watched the pieces come off [the truck] ," he says. "They were with all the furniture blankets. We went to the blankets, and there they were in the bin, covered by blankets."

(For more information: Ray Kaupp, vice president of marketing, BroadWare Technologies; phone: [phone]; fax: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail].)