When Irisys stopped selling Vector 4D hardware in March 2023 and wound down limited customer support by March 2024, the quiet casualty was not the counters themselves. Most Vector 4D units in the field will keep counting accurately for years. The casualty was the operational layer around them: firmware distribution, remote configuration, health monitoring, and the escalation path you used to have when a device on site 214 stopped reporting at 3 a.m. That is the real problem an irisys estate manager alternative has to solve — not replacing hardware that still works, but replacing the manufacturer's management umbrella that no longer exists.
If you administer a fleet of Vector 4D or Gazelle devices, be precise about what you lost, because your budget conversation depends on it. You lost the vendor-backed route for firmware updates and security patches. You lost a support desk that could validate whether a counting anomaly was a device fault or a site condition. And you lost the assumption — often unspoken in IT risk registers — that someone upstream is accountable for the toolchain that touches every device on your estate.
What you did not lose is the fleet itself. Vector 4D is time-of-flight hardware with a long service life, and ripping out hundreds of ceiling-mounted units to switch vendor is the most expensive possible response to a software and support gap. Recabling, re-surveying mounting heights, revalidating count lines, retraining store operations — implementers who have done a full estate swap will tell you the hardware cost is often the smallest line on that invoice. Site access alone, coordinated across trading hours and landlord permissions, can stretch a replacement programme across two financial years.
This is where the framing of "alternative" matters. You are not looking for a different device administration paradigm. Your team already knows how Vector 4D configuration works — count lines, exclusion zones, height filtering, register layouts. What you need is that same administration, hosted somewhere with a future.
Vemco Group has been an Irisys partner for more than 15 years, and Estate Manager is fully integrated into the Vemco platform. In practice that means remote access and control of your Vector 4D and Gazelle devices from one place, with the device administration workflows your team already uses — but wrapped inside an enterprise analytics platform rather than left orphaned by an end-of-life notice. Vemco was founded in Denmark in 2005, so this is not a partner that arrived after the EOL announcement to pick over the estate; the Irisys relationship predates most of the Vector 4D units currently on ceilings.
For an IT team, the operational difference is concrete:
Here is something that rarely appears in vendor documentation but every implementer knows: the majority of "broken counter" tickets on a mature Irisys estate are not device failures. They are environmental drift. A store refit moves a promotional gondola under the sensor. A lighting change alters the scene. A new entrance mat shifts where people pause, and dwell behaviour near the count line changes the pattern the device sees. The device is fine; the world under it moved.
This is exactly why losing manufacturer support hurts more than it first appears. Without a management layer, environmental drift goes undetected until someone in commercial finance notices a store's conversion rate looks implausible — often months after the refit. With Estate Manager sitting inside an analytics platform, the drift shows up as a data anomaly first, and the remote configuration tools to fix it are in the same interface. That closed loop between "the number looks wrong" and "here is the device view to correct it" is the difference between a two-day fix and a quarter of quietly corrupted data.
If your footfall data feeds staffing models, landlord turnover reporting or marketing attribution, you carry an accuracy obligation regardless of whether Irisys still answers the phone. Under the Vemco platform, that obligation is contractual: a minimum counting accuracy of 96 percent, and in typical conditions — sensible lighting, a store layout without pathological blind spots, ordinary visitor behaviour — devices perform at 98 to 99 percent. Be wary of any provider quoting a flat 99 percent guarantee; anyone who has stood under a sensor watching a school group swirl through an entrance knows conditions matter, and honest contracts reflect that.
The point for budget holders: contractual accuracy backed by a live management layer is defensible in front of a landlord or a CFO. An unmanaged, unsupported estate producing numbers nobody can validate is not — even if the sensors are, in fact, still accurate.
The realistic estate strategy after Vector 4D's end of life has two phases. First, stabilise: bring the existing fleet under managed administration so devices are monitored, configurable and producing validated data. Second, evolve on your own schedule: because the Vemco platform spans device management through to advanced analytics — footfall, queue measurement, re-ID tracking — hardware refresh becomes a planned capability decision rather than a forced replacement. Sites that would benefit from queue analytics or re-ID get prioritised; sites where a Vector 4D counting a single entrance is doing its job perfectly get left alone until it makes financial sense.
That sequencing is the whole argument. End of life ended the manufacturer's involvement. It did not end your estate, your team's expertise, or your data obligations — and it should not dictate your capital expenditure timetable.
If you are managing Vector 4D or Gazelle devices without manufacturer support, talk to us before your next refresh budget is locked. Vemco Group can walk through your estate inventory, show Estate Manager running inside the platform, and map a stabilise-then-evolve plan against your actual sites. Get in touch at vemcogroup.com/contact-us.