ZNV Technology, a world leading security company and ZTE's spin-off, just announced its launch of H.265 IP cameras this September. By debuting this H.265 IP camera, ZNV is able to fully demonstrate its recent accomplishment in technological innovation and further sustain its global presence. Despite being a new name in the security industry, ZNV positions itself as a professional solution provider, setting themselves apart from most other Chinese competitors.
ZNV Technology, a world leading security company and ZTE's spin-off, just announced its launch of H.265 IP cameras this September. By debuting this H.265 IP camera, ZNV is able to fully demonstrate its recent accomplishment in technological innovation and further sustain its global presence. Despite being a new name in the security industry, ZNV positions itself as a professional solution provider, setting themselves apart from most other Chinese competitors.
ZNV Technology, carrying a strong technological background from ZTE, is ready to take a bolder approach in the global security industry. Even though the company remains new in most countries, its strong local presence in China has resulted in high recognition. ZNV was ranked as “a&s 2013 Top 10 Security Brands in China,” selected by engineering/systems integrators and end users.
.jpg)
Forming a World Class Management Team
Through the latest appointment of Robert Zhu as Executive Chairman in May 2014, the company is fully demonstrating its determination to focus on security. Zhu, with rich experience in global security business management, was former VP and GM of South Asia for ABB Group and former President for APAC and China of Tyco International. Zhu said, “The first mission for my appointment is to elevate the company to be greatly involved in global business.”
With its abundant knowledge and experience in the telecommunications industry, ZNV is quite unique with specialties in wired/wireless communication, sensing technologies, and signal processing. Now the company is able to develop industrial solutions in a full spectrum, Zhu continued.
Besides appointing the new Executive Chairman, in order to form a world-leading security team and further become a competitive company, ZNV has also strengthened its sales management team by hiring the former GM of Honeywell Security, as well as other industry experts in different sales channels. By doing all this, ZNV hopes it can stand out from other strong competitors. Instead of its hardware manufacturing capability, the company is focusing on penetrating and concentrating on different verticals and industries.
.jpg)
Solutions, Not Just Products
The global demand toward security equipment is increasing rapidly. Not only are the frequent major global security breaches propelling technological breakthroughs, but so are new applications such as high or ultra-high resolution or ultra-low illumination. However, merely providing high-quality and special products for customers is not enough. Zhu, therefore, suggests that the security industry should focus more on how to maximize overall value of security devices and services, particularly for operational and business management efficiency for certain market sectors. In the future, security systems will become a tool for corporate management.
Therefore, in order to elevate a company's overall corporate capability during the transition from product manufacturing to solution design, the company should be knowledgeable in communication, signal analysis, and management platform in order to satisfy the specific needs for some particular vertical markets. These indeed are the specialties of ZNV, Zhu highlighted. “ZNV is a technology company, which is able to do an in-depth research on projects and then provide the pertinent solutions to them,” he continued.
‟We do not just merely think about how to apply the products for a certain application but care about what the project really needs and wants. However, most of the Chinese companies only think about how to let users see clear pictures and that's it, with nothing more.”
Specialized in Industrial Solutions With Unique Design
By positioning itself as a solution provider, ZNV is taking quite a different approach to the security business. First, the company utilizes its own strength in the telecommunications sector where ZNV has the largest market share in China. “In these projects, what we accumulated is not just video surveillance but also the know-how of monitoring the generator room of an industrial environment,” said Zhu. ZTE provides communication services to more than 1.2 million substations in China and ZNV is in charge of one-fourth of their video monitoring projects, including HD picture quality transmission, temperature and humidity control, HVAC system control, battery management (uninterruptible power supply and regular charging and discharging power), and access control. “We intend to combine these know-hows with our in-house video content analytics (VCA) R&D lab and apply both to other industries, such as railways or power stations, which also require an independent and integrated security system,” said Zhu.
In terms of product features, ZNV also stands outs in communication and transmission capability in its video surveillance cameras. For instance, Zhu mentioned, “We add a special communication function in a 4G-LTE camera. Normally, the regular camera only transmits via cables. However, in many of the industrial environments, the cables are usually under the risk of being cut off. Therefore, our products support Wi-Fi wireless connectivity. When the cable transmission fails, the Wi-Fi connection will automatically be activated. If the Wi-Fi connectivity also fails, we also have our preset SIM card which can also immediately turn on the wireless telecommunication function to keep the normal operation of data transmission. ZNV is able to provide all these extra added values to our customers.
Restructing R&D Team
ZNV, then, began restructuring its R&D team right after Zhu joined the to tailor solutions for specific vertical markets. Zhu mentioned that now the company has around a 400-person R&D team. Instead of taking the traditional way to divide the team by technologies, ZNV now divides them depending on the solutions and projects. He said, “According to what the specific project needs, we form the designated team by its requirements toward software, hardware, and encoding and processing technologies to accelerate the speed of product development. For instance, the R&D team developing H.265 would normally need around 30 people, but we transfer and borrow some manpower from other teams if necessary. Just because of this, we are able to stay flexible and quickly develop products according to what the market really needs.”
H.265 IP Cameras Lift ZNV to Global Technology Leader
High-definition cameras for security monitoring, remote machine operation, or other applications are required mostly because the sharp images will help users identify security threats or control a machine remotely. The current challenges are the cost of transmission and storage of largesized data over the network and cloud. By overcoming the bandwidth and storage challenges that the security industry has been facing for years, ZNV has finally made a market breakthrough, launching H.265 high-definition IP cameras this September.
H.265 is the latest compression technology which can save up to 10 times the bandwidth and storage space compared to the current H.264 compression technology. The company predicts H.265 IP cameras will quickly be adopted by some retrofit projects where end users expect to upgrade their video surveillance systems, such as the education sector. Other target customers are end users that have demand for high capacity storage devices, such as a smart city project. “Normally, H.264 cameras can store video images for 12 months with 20 TB storage. However, keeping the same high-definition videos, H.265 technology can reduce the data size by three times in dynamic scenes like a busy street and up to 10 times in static scenes like a guarded warehouse. So, it is very attractive for a large scale project in greatly reducing the total cost of ownership,” said Robert Zhu, Executive Chairman of ZNV.
“ZNV is very focused on developing our own technologies about H.265 compression. We have been developing H.265 technology for two years and acquired many patents in decoding and encoding technologies, and system design. H.265 algorithm is more complex compared to H.264. It has to be flexible and accurate, and follow many international standards. An example is we owned a patent in motion encoding technologies in order to largely reduce the bandwidth in the static scenes, which is useful for end users who want to save the bandwidth and also cost of storage. A major issue of H.265 cameras is the overheating problem. We have solved this problem from the hardware design to the internal design for heat dissipation. We now are working on the application for this patent,” said Zhu.
The company further predicts that in a year, H.265 will be ready to grow in double digits.
Abundant International Experience
Even though ZNV just recently got fully involved in international business and marketing, ZNV products and services have been applied to 70 countries globally via ZTE. Zhu provided an example that ZNV used to implement their security equipment for a ZTE project of a substation in Pakistan. “Luckily, we acquired the overseas experience quite early compared to other companies. Our goal right now is to explore more new markets other than telecommunications industry. In order to achieve that goal, we have started to quickly establish our international partner network in some geographic markets. Our showroom in Malaysia was just set up recently to showcase our latest products, systems, and solutions. This year, we started some new partnership in South Africa and South America too. In the near future, we are expecting more from the U.S. and Europe.”
Looking to the Future
ZNV, indeed, is taking a different approach to face the challenges of global market competition. Most importantly, ZNV has a high level of understanding in technology and specialtiers in industrial environments. It can be expected that ZNV will soon become another new star in the global security industry.