Walking the show floor here in Las Vegas at the ISC West event today, it is very evident that the evolution of video surveillance technology is constant and streaming in many directions. While the development of straight hardware product pales in comparison to emerging software platforms, it is interesting to note that services end of the business is making great strides as a crucial adjunct to any enterprise-level system.
Much like the commercial television marketplace, video surveillance cameras are almost identical in most of their functionality. And like their TV counterparts, they share the distinction of being pretty much a single-source recipient of their chip technology.
“When you look at what is driving the video surveillance industry; right now it is silicon. All the features that you see in today’s cameras aren’t coming from one single camera manufacturer; they are coming from a single silicon manufacturer. That means your Chinese manufacturers, your European, American, Japanese and Korean manufacturers all source the same silicon,” says Vicon Industries CEO Eric Fullerton. “Some exceptions remain in the market and can make their own chips like Hikvision and Axis Communications, but the rest of us getting the imagers and processors from the same places. So the cameras are becoming jellybeans. That means you can differentiate how you package it. But the firmware is not the differentiator any longer.”
So where does that leave vendors like Vicon, who have worked extremely hard to earn new business after a period of stagnated technology development Fullerton was hired to cure. His answer is simple.
“Our path is very clear. Because of where the industry is going, it means Vicon is going to be a software company. We will be world leaders in video management software, camera firmware, and applications that add value. What sort of applications am I talking about? There is a big move to video-enabled business intelligence, which is based on meta data and manipulation of analytics, along with a lot of other things like big data analysis, the internet of things and other connectors that require video integration. That is our future,” says Fullerton.
For vendors like Panasonic’s Charlie Hare, the future is here. Adoption of IP-centric technology and the migration from analog platforms to IT-network controlled functionality signals the direction his products will follow.
“Manufacturers like Panasonic and others are putting a priority on the encoding technologies to help with improved compression rates which help lower the total cost of ownership storage and bandwidth. Almost all of our cameras now have the smart coding,” relates Hare, who is the National Category Manager for Security and Evidence Management Solutions.
Hare also contends that we will continue to experience industry consolidation, which ultimately will impact integrators and end users alike. But he feels that many of his customers are already setting their technology roadmaps and his products must meet the needs of a varied level of competencies.
“We will continue to see consolidation continuing in the coming years. But there are different classes of customers that you will have to serve. There are those that demand and want that purpose-built security platform. They don’t want computers, blue screens or virus updates,” Hare says. “There is another class of customer we see that grew up in the IP world and feel comfortable in the IP world. That security director is an IT professional and plays within that domain and wants VMS and a computer-based platform. They want to integrate their systems with best of class solutions – like a Cisco switch or a Dell server. With our acquisition of Video Insight, we have a very balanced offering and will also allow us to expand into other vertical markets.”
Perhaps one of the more unique solutions seen this week in Las Vegas was March Networks’ industry-first new service and support capabilities that help certified partners and customers access at-a-glance intelligence of their video surveillance networks.
“This basically is a software tool that we are providing as managed services to help people better understand the overall health of their organization. So let’s say there is a particular site that a client is looking to trouble-shoot. You would call up March so we could create a ticket that allows the client to track the incident. We then take that call from tech support and visually displaying it so one person can see the entire organizational landscape,” explains Cremins, the Director, Product Line Management at March Networks. “Say you have 1,000 recorders being displayed; the operator can tell there are recorders in New York with issues open, as well as others in California with the same problems. The cool thing with this solution is you can take the critical information and overlay against a timeline. You discover there is a site in New York where you seem to be rolling a truck every other month; now you can see that it is unusual and is costing you money.”
He adds that this is the sort of big data breakdown that can be displayed on a dashboard providing the client information that demonstrates where the trouble spots are with these particular units and signals the need to have them replaced. This is not a product, it is a service. And that will be a next step in the evolution of video as he sees it in the future.
About the Author:
Steve Lasky is the editorial director for SouthComm Security Media Group and its conference director for Secured Cities. He is a 30-year security veteran and ASIS member.
