Userful Powers Security Operations Center at Portugal’s World of Wine

Video wall displaying live camera footage in security operations control room in Portugal's World of Wine managed by Userful's platform

About The Project

World of Wine (WoW) is an entertainment district in the heart of Porto, Portugal’s second largest city. The 55,000 square meter complex consists of museums, restaurants, shops, and entertainment venues all devoted to Portugal’s wine industry. World of Wine welcomes millions of visitors from around the world. To ensure the safety of both visitors and the premises, WoW set up a Security Operations Center (SOC) to ensure their security team had a global view of all their video surveillance systems, including CCTV, intrusion, fire alarms, access control and automation.

The Challenge

WoW turned to COSMO software, a Userful partner and specialists in unified systems for mission-critical applications, to provide the technology for their SOC. They immediately recognized the main challenge in providing a global, unified security system. “Centralized management for security systems poses many challenges on a project such as this”, says Fernando Santos, Director of Development and Integration, COSMO Software. “We are talking about a very complex infrastructure with multiple locations and multiple security applications. Additionally, given the vast number of people visiting the district, they needed to ensure the highest level of security and fast response times”.

The Solution

In order to provide true situational awareness to the WoW SOC operators, COSMO chose Userful for the display infrastructure. Userful’s Visual Networking Platform gives operators the ability to easily manage and manipulate an almost unlimited number of visual sources on a video wall in real-time with an easy-to-use interface. Additionally, Userful’s flexibility allowed COSMO to swiftly integrate their PSIM+ smart security solution, using Userful’s REST API.

The Userful platform integrated with COSMO’s solution effectively breaks traditional silos in SOC deployments that involve multiple security systems. “The integration with Userful’s Visual Networking Platform”, says Santos “was essential to provide a shared vision of all systems, make it easy to operate, monitor system status on all equipment, and more importantly, enable an increased reaction speed to an alarm or incident”.

"From a technical standpoint, it was the most modern way to present a video wall and the most flexible."

The Result

The World of Wine Security Operations Center is one of the largest SOCs in Portugal.

Userful’s Visual Networking Platform ensures operators have true situational awareness—reducing response times and increasing operational efficiency. By making it easy to bring in real-time visual sources, quickly display them using a point-and-click simple interface, operators are able to proactively identify and address any security issues and threats across the entire 55,000 square meters district.

According to Duarte Almas, Facilities Manager at World Of Wine, “The system facilitates the operation and enables the end-user to rapidly identify any situation that might occur within the complex. The greatest advantage of the integrated Userful and COSMO system is having our entire security visible in a single window. This saves us a lot of time because we don’t have to open about 5 or 6 different types of windows, to be able to get to the problem or detect it.”

Rapid response is vital in a Security Operations Centers (SOC), and for a project site with the size and magnitude of the World of Wine (WoW), a hardware-based, siloed approach simply wouldn’t meet their needs. The flexibility of Userful’s platform enabled the seamless integration of COSMO’s PSIM+ smart security, which resulted in a powerful solution that delivered true situational awareness for the WoW’s SOC operators.