Erste built a new group headquarters on the site of the former Südbahnhof railway station in Vienna, with construction work taking place from 2012 to 2016. Employees who were previously distributed across 20 different locations throughout the city now all work in the same building complex. The advantages of this new arrangement are clear: closer proximity and improved infrastructure strengthen cooperation and provide a modern, pleasant working environment for employees.
The headquarters’ groundbreaking, award-winning design by Vienna architects Henke Schreieck Architekten plays a key role by creating a feeling of openness with its curved buildings and integrated green spaces, producing an environment that encourages creativity. The highest construction standards were applied to the planning of the new building complex — which accommodates around 4,000 employees — in order to optimize cost-effectiveness by minimizing energy use and operating costs. The Erste Campus was awarded the DGNB (German Sustainable Building Council) platinum certificate for responsible, green building.
Security was also a major priority for the new headquarters. In 2014, the Erste Group put out a tender based on a detailed catalog of requirements for an overall building security concept for its campus. Among other things, the requirements included video surveillance and intelligent video analysis. The video technology needed to support security personnel, detect security-critical events in real time around the clock and, when necessary, raise an alarm immediately. To ensure smooth communication and quick responses, seamless integration was required between the video analysis application, the video management system and all other components and systems.
Kapsch BusinessCom won the tender with an overall concept featuring video technology based on Coda Video as the VMS, together with Coda Video Analytics. A key factor in the success of this solution was the close dovetailing of the two systems, made possible by the flexible architecture of Coda Video — which, for example, shares the image streams from cameras. Alarm events from Coda Video Analytics are seamlessly transferred to Coda Video, where they are visualized and processed.
Another major factor in the selection process was ensuring the video system complied with the high IT standards in the banking sector. This was verified in advance by extensive testing, and Coda Video supports encrypted communication between servers and clients, as well as secure connections with the cameras. The protection of customers’ and employees’ privacy is also crucial — Coda Video Analytics employs algorithms to disguise people’s identities in live images by using pixelization.