March 2024 came and went, and something interesting happened: nothing. Thousands of Irisys sensors that officially lost manufacturer support that month kept counting. If you manage one of those estates, you already know the hardware was never the problem. Irisys announced end-of-sale and end-of-life for the Vector 4D line in March 2023, citing economic pressure and rising component costs, with limited support running only until March 2024. But the thermal counting units themselves — IRC series, Gazelle, Gazelle 2, Vector 4D — were engineered to run for years without intervention, and more than 500,000 of them were deployed worldwide. A large share are still on ceilings, still accurate, still doing their job.
The real question for estate managers is not "do I rip everything out?" It is "what actually breaks first, and what does it cost me when it does?" That question has concrete answers, and they should drive your budget conversation — not a vendor's replacement timeline.
Anyone who has run these devices at scale will tell you the same thing: the thermal detector array almost never dies. Irisys — InfraRed Integrated Systems, founded in 1996 near Northampton and acquired by Fluke in 2012 — built hardware with genuinely long mean time between failures. What fails in practice is everything around the sensor:
Notice the pattern: three of those four failure modes are solved with software, remote management and integration work — not new hardware. Only the last one forces a purchasing decision, and it forces it site by site, not estate-wide.
Full estate replacement is being pitched hard right now, usually with an urgency framing borrowed from the end-of-life announcement. Run the numbers yourself before signing. For a 200-site estate averaging two sensors per site, you are looking at hardware, ceiling access, electrical work, out-of-hours installation windows, recommissioning, count-line validation at every entrance, and typically several weeks of parallel running before finance will accept the new baseline. The soft costs — retraining store teams on new dashboards, rebuilding historical trend comparisons, explaining a step-change in the numbers to stakeholders — often exceed the hardware line on the invoice.
Set that against the alternative: keep working sensors working, and replace only where hardware actually fails or where a refit demands it anyway. That converts a large capital request into a modest, predictable operating cost — which is a much easier conversation with whoever holds your budget.
This is where you need to be picky. Plenty of providers will "take the data feed" from your Irisys estate. Far fewer can actually manage the devices. The difference matters enormously in year two, when a store manager rings about a count discrepancy and someone needs to log into the sensor, review the count lines, and fix it without a site visit.
Vemco Group has been an Irisys partner for more than 15 years — since well before the Fluke era ended in a product discontinuation — and still supports Irisys devices in its platform. Estate Manager is fully integrated with the Vemco platform, giving remote access and control of Vector 4D and Gazelle devices: firmware, configuration, count-line adjustment, diagnostics. That distinction between "ingesting your data" and "managing your devices" is the single most important question to ask any prospective partner. If they cannot remotely reconfigure a Vector 4D after a store refit, they are not supporting your estate; they are just receiving numbers from it.
On accuracy: a well-maintained Irisys estate under proper management should still meet a contractual minimum of 96 percent counting accuracy, and in practice typically achieves 98 to 99 percent where conditions — lighting, store layout, visitor behaviour — allow. If a provider promises you a flat guaranteed 99 percent regardless of site conditions, treat it as a red flag rather than a selling point.
Eventually, sensors do get replaced — through damage, refits, or new-site openings. The trap is letting each replacement lock you into a single new manufacturer, recreating exactly the dependency that the Irisys end-of-life just taught you to avoid. A sensor-agnostic platform sidesteps this. Vemco supports Xovis, Milesight, Elsys, Hikvision, Axis and Irisys within the same platform, which means a Vector 4D at one entrance and a stereo-vision unit at the flagship next door report into one consistent data layer. Your dashboards, alerts and historical comparisons stay intact while the hardware underneath changes gradually.
A practitioner's note from mixed migrations: when you do swap a thermal sensor for a stereo or ToF device, run both technologies in parallel at a handful of representative sites for at least two full trading weeks, including a weekend and ideally a promotional period. Thermal and optical sensors handle edge cases differently — pushchairs, trolleys, tall queues near the count line — and you want to quantify the offset before finance sees a discontinuity in the trend line. Documenting a 1–2 percent methodology difference in advance takes ten minutes; explaining an unexplained footfall jump after the fact takes weeks.
Start with an audit, not a purchase order. Map which sites run which models — IRC, Gazelle, Gazelle 2, Vector 4D — confirm which units are healthy, identify where data is flowing but unmanaged, and flag the sites with refits scheduled in the next 18 months as your natural migration candidates. That single document turns an end-of-life scare into a three-to-five-year plan you control.
If you are running an existing Irisys estate and want it supported, remotely managed and future-proofed — rather than ripped out on someone else's schedule — talk to Vemco Group. Founded in Denmark in 2005 and an Irisys partner for over 15 years, Vemco can keep your Vector 4D and Gazelle sensors counting and build your migration path around your budget cycle. Contact Vemco Group here to arrange an estate review.