"Change is the future and the rate of change has simply moved faster and faster over the last fifteen years with the development of the Internet."
AXIS COMMUNICATIONS’ CHANNEL CONVERGENCE CONFERENCE, held in Austin, Texas in early October, included Axis’ premier resellers throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico, their distributors and the vendors partners who enable their cameras.
The event kicked off with Bill Crowell, the former director of the National Security Administration (NSA), talking about DARPA funding the Internet in 1970 and its commercial development over the last fifteen years. Yes, fifteen little years to get to where we are today! Crowell noted that the Internet is actually attributed with increasing productivity by 3.5 percent. He discussed that there are data breaches, of course, but expects significant gains in the next couple years in regards to data protection with smart card technology, subnets to contain different sensitive content and through splitting encrypted streams of data sending it in pieces instead of the whole. He also expects that new event management solutions will be developed to increase security on both sides of the physical and logical equation.
Axis product director, Kent Fransson talked about how in 2008 we had one megapixel cameras and by 2012 we can have up to 10 megapixel cameras. He discussed how consumers are driving technology development through their buying interests. Image sensors are the most important part of a camera and they get smaller and smaller producing better quality images, setting a standard of expectation amongst consumers. Consumers expect to have High Definition (HD), 720 pixel and full frame rates in both their phones and on their walls to view television. Moore’s Law says that we can get twice the performance at one half the cost every eighteen months which means smaller, faster and better—or fifty times more power and better performance in cameras, batteries, analytics, and so on. Image sensors will require half the light that they require today and will produce half the noise which again increases the quality of the image. Lenses will have a higher resolution with better optics requiring less light to produce a clearer image. And nobody really knows where this all ends.
In 2009 Axis introduced 30 new products. Some products were upgrades. There was an HDTV series, audio modules and lenses at affordable pricing and 18 times optical lenses with a 35 X zoom, H.264 technology and more, with more to come. They build new products as soon as technology developments allow them to. And they build these products based on consumer requests that come through their reseller partners.
It’s rare for any traditional security manufacturer to introduce so many products in a year, let alone year after year. But change is the future, and the rate of change has simply moved faster and faster over the last fifteen years with the development of the Internet. And as Fransson says, there is no end in sight.
Professor Thomas Kalling of Lund University also spoke at this event discussing how to adjust to the speed of change. You can read more about this in his article on page 54, “The Management Side of Selling IP.” In short, it’s all about deciding how you will adapt to the pace of changes and if you will be a technology leader, follower, somewhere in the middle or not at all. Once you decide your role, it’s pretty easy to execute it from there.
Carol Enman
Publisher
