Xenics has signed a non-exclusive distribution and technology development agreement with French distributor Elvitec S.A.S for the homeland and industrial security markets in France. Products covered by the Xenics / Elvitec distribution and partnership agreement are the Xenics SWIR cameras of the Rufus series, and the LWIR cameras of the Raven and Meerkat series. All of these will be available from Elvitec as PAL-, NTSC- and CoaXPress- enabled versions. Under the terms of the agreement Elvitec will also act as a technology partner by developing complete vision and image processing systems and offering integration and customization services. The overall strategy of the Xenics / Elvitec partnership is to add commercial value to customers through one unified sales and service channel. This will provide access to a common systems and software platform by covering the full wavelength spectrum. For Xenics, the agreement is another step of broadening its position in the homeland and industrial security markets by relying on Elvitec's established user base of systems integrators and educational capabilities to guide users in developing efficient industrial security solutions.

The three high-performance state-of-the-art camera families covered by the agreement serve as a complementary product base to prospective users. The Xenics SWIR Rufus series is best suited for object identification over short and long-range distances under ultra-low light and bad weather conditions to overcome the limitations of visible-light imagers and photo counters. On the thermal side, LWIR cameras are widely used in demanding object detection applications, where the Raven series offers a ready-to-integrate camera for thermal object detection delivering crisp images. The Xenics Meerkat series was specifically designed as a weather-proof camera with PAL- or Ethernet based Onvif protocol to allow easy interconnect for end users and installers.

"The homeland and industrial security markets are very important to us," says Xenics founder and CEO Bob Grietens. "Besides moving into direct sales to high-level OEMs and systems manufacturers, we are broadening our base of specialized distributors and technology partners. I highly welcome our newly signed cooperation agreement with Elvitec. We will gladly take on the challenges of the French security markets to define the next-generation interface standards as well as further increase product performance of the covered camera equipment."

"We are very excited about this new partnership agreement," said Yannick Harlaut, Managing and Commercial Director of Elvitec S.A.S. "Besides the industrial markets Elvitec is growing in the security and defense markets taking on challenging new applications. To cover the growing number of requests we need to go beyond the visible spectrum and see what a conventional camera cannot see. Xenics is the perfect choice because of their wide range of products and technologies. We welcome to work with a leading European manufacturer very close to us and to our customers.