64 BCBusiness OctOber 2014
Ho Kim
President and CEO
CAMACC Systems Inc.
I
f you filled up your tank recently, chances
are Ho Kim's cameras were watching you.
Founded in 1998, at the height of the tech
boom,
CAMACC Systems Inc. (CAMera
ACCess) is one of North America's largest
installers of video recorders and access con-
trol systems, with more than 200,000 cam-
eras and 100,000 remote door locks in gas
stations, grocery stores and across Canada.
CAMACC—which specializes in full-service,
national rollouts of security equipment—
designs, builds and installs both its software
and hardware for the likes of Suncor, Gate-
way Casino Corp. and London Drugs. "We're
very unique," says Kim, a 47-year-old college
dropout from Victoria who moved to Vancou-
ver Island from South Korea at the age of two.
"We're one of the very few in our industry to
have everything under one roof."
CAMACC's headquarters, a 10-minute drive
from the Swartz Bay ferry terminal, houses
Kim's most valued asset: the company's
24/7 customer support centre. Nine 50-inch
monitors line the walls of
CAMACC's situation
room-like facility, where seven full-time tech
support employees can check over 300 live
feeds from clients' cameras from coast to
coast (with their permission, of course). "In
a lot of cases, we can let a client know that
there's a problem on their site before they're
aware of it," says Kim.
While
CAMACC now has a dedicated
software engineering team for client requests
and revenues that top $17 million a year, in
the early years, Kim and his partner devoted
their working days to signing clients‚ and
evenings to building their product: tinkering
with the cameras, fixing bugs, loading and
testing software. "When you're a small com-
pany starting out, you wear every single hat,"
says Kim. "Manufacturing was one of those
hats." —Jacob Parry
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