Milestone Systems announced on Thursday that its’ video management software will soon be available for hardware vendor partners to embed in their own DVR and NVR product offerings. The new embedded platform dubbed "Arcus" is the first release from Milestone’s Incubation and Ventures business unit, which the company launched late last summer.
According to Lars Nordenlund Friis, Milestone’s vice president of incubation, the idea behind Arcus was to develop an easy to use, easy to install VMS offering to take advantage of the numerous low-complexity, low-cost security installations in the market and the continued migration from analog-based technology to IP. Friis said the market for solutions that help current analog users make the transition to IP could be worth as much as $10 billion by 2015.
"We think there is a huge opportunity in the transition from analog to IP," Friis told SIW last month at the Milestone Integration Platform Symposium (MIPS) in Las Vegas.
Balaji Srimoolanathan, a principal consultant for market research firm Frost & Sullivan, agrees that the Arcus platform will enable hardware vendors to take advantage of this lower end of the surveillance market.
"There is conservatively $6 billion in analog sales by 2015 that will be converting to IP in the security equipment market, not including service and maintenance. Milestone Arcus opens up new growth opportunities in which hardware vendors can accelerate their business," he said. "Milestone Arcus is timed right for this trend and can reach the low end of the security market that will be in transition. It will be a major driver, with huge impact in motivating a lot of people to move toward IP."
Despite the fact that more people are moving to IP, Friis said that it can be difficult for a traditional IP hardware vendor to break into the analog market. Being an embedded platform, however, Friis said Arcus will "take the complexity" out of setting up a VMS solution for those who may not be "IT savvy" as it offers a basic feature set for users that just want to record and playback video.
"Everyone says that is what they want… something that is as easy to deploy as analog and as effective as IP," Friis added.
That’s not to say that Arcus is not a robust video management solution. According to Friis, while Arcus was designed to be easy to use and install, he said it also a highly-scalable solution that’s only limited by the hardware on which it’s running.
Milestone will showcase several of its vendor partners who have been early adopters of the Arcus platform in their booth (#20149) at ISC West 2013.
