Rather than conforming to the standard, familiar, yet stagnant layout that we have come to associate VMS with, Network Optix aims to deliver something that upends the way video is viewed, controlled, and managed.
Network Optix (Nx) is a young company in the video management software business. Founded in 2011, the company began as a media player developer. With extensive experience in video, plus the founders’ knowledge in security, the company migrated to VMS, which today forms the core of the company’s business.
Unsurprisingly, the company’s background in media player drove Nx to tackle a major issue facing VMS products in the market, the user experience issue. Rather than conforming to the standard, familiar, yet stagnant layout that we have come to associate VMS with, the company aims to deliver something that upends the way video is viewed, controlled, and managed.
“With security, usability has always been a problem, and that’s a problem we’re solving,” said Tony Luce, Director of Marketing and Business Development at Nx. “A lot of security guys out there … they do checklists: this feature and this feature. We’re more focused on how to make viewing and managing video systems fun and interactive.”
It all starts with the user interface, which abandons the eight-square or 16-square layout of images from different cameras. Rather, the user selects the cameras or servers in question and drags them to the center of the screen to be controlled or “played with.” Add a bookmark to any point in the video, and it can be retrieved in the future or shared with other parties quickly. Enter a search criteria or select an area of interest, the system can pull all relevant video from a year worth of data in less than five seconds.
Meanwhile, the VMS offers many features that are otherwise offered to “enterprise” customers by other companies. For example, the server-hive architecture allows each server to synchronize system information with every other server in the system, thus enabling users to connect to any system server at any time. The automatic failover function allows the system to recognize server failure and then move the cameras to another system server. With the one-click system-wide update feature, updates can be applied to all devices in the system simultaneously, sparing the integrator the labor of going to each site individually.
Already, Network Optix has systems in 130 countries, as well as operations in Hong Kong, Taipei, and Moscow besides its Burbank, Calif. headquarters.
What’s next, the company seeks to expand to areas outside security. “We have a customer that has 2,000 cameras and they do production. They monitor production processes. Completely not security, but they use our product because they like it,” Luce said.
According to him, the security industry moves at such a slow pace it “hurts” the industry, and that’s the situation that the company wants to address. To Nx, the way video surveillance works today – recording video at 30fps on a 24/7 basis – is just making “boring movies.” Its true value comes when it becomes less “siloed” and integrated with other data analytics applications to visually aide users in different aspects of their lives.
“Security is interesting because it makes you think about how video is useful. Video by itself is not necessarily the end solution. Video integrated with other information systems becomes powerful,” he said. “Our challenge this year is how do we continue to expand our platform and make it more relevant to more industries, not just security. We’re going to be adding a cloud layer. We’re looking at AI machine learning. The next two to three years will be very rapid in terms of cloud and machine learning.”