Milestone: Creating an intelligent future for the community

Milestone Systems recently hosted its second Milestone Integration Platform Symposium (MIPS) in Hanoi, Vietnam, which saw partners across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region coming together to network and create new business opportunities, as well as to hear about Milestone’s vision and plans for the coming year.

How can human and artificial intelligence (AI) be used to solve challenges in this ever-changing world? These issues were addressed at Milestone’s second community event in APAC, after a successful launch in 2017 in Macau. Trends defining how to build and sell intelligent video solutions were some of the topics addressed at the conference. There were also state-of-the-art tech demos shown at the event and attendees learned about Milestone’s strategy and business plans.

With networking of businesses and the strong community partnerships, partners are discovering the latest trends and innovative products and services that are changing the video technology industry. Participation of the event grew significantly this year, as partners continued to explore what Milestone has in store for the region in the year ahead.

“Our event last year had 280 attendees. This year we welcomed 350, with half of these being new partners to the Milestone community. This is testament to the growing value that such conferences bring — by showcasing collaboration and innovation in the IP video surveillance industry. It is rewarding to see partners coming together to hear us share our vision for the future,” said Benjamin Low, VP for APAC at Milestone Systems. “Through networking and sharing of business objectives, it is invaluable for them and other stakeholders like distributors and resellers to build new connections.”

Angelo Salvatore, Regional Channel Director for Milestone Systems, concurs with this observation. These thought leadership opportunities help in strengthening partner relationships, expressing new ideas and inspiring the community. “We are at an inflection point for our industry. The video technology revolution is at our doorstep. With over 20 partners from our community, the event gets bigger and more exciting. Milestone not only brings the community together but provides the platform to achieve these future opportunities and creates the solutions for tomorrow.”

Strong integration partnerships on display at MIPS

The Milestone Community Innovation Lab showcases the range of software and products that have been integrated with Milestone’s video management software (VMS) platform.

Dell EMC, a Milestone partner for many years, was among the exhibitors at MIPS Hanoi. The surveillance infrastructure provider highlighted its elastic cloud storage solution, a software-defined solution that works seamlessly with Milestone’s VMS.

According to Andrew Hubble, Sales Director of Asia Pacific and Japan for Surveillance and Security at Dell EMC, there was a natural synergy between the two companies to go to market together. “We work with Milestone to drive solutions in key verticals like smart cities, government, public sector and transportation where the Dell EMC storage portfolio is historically strong and Milestone’s architecture working extremely well within our infrastructure,” he said.

Hubble believes that users can greatly benefit from the two companies’ tried and true integration, saying, “We specialize in the safety and security market, which is the fastest growing surveillance vertical. Our specific value proposition with Milestone is driven by a deep engineering-to-engineering relationship. Our longstanding commitment together means that our solutions are lab-validated and hardened, de-risking the solution and streamlining the process for our customers. The documentation output for each project then becomes a reference for the whole world and not simply a one-time project,” he said.  

The Milestone roadmap to an intelligent future

New technologies and developments are pushing the security industry to change. Milestone responded to this challenge a few years back by transforming itself from a product driven to a platform-centric company. The company has not looked back since, as this bold move has enabled it to build a strong partner community and realize a greater potential for growth.

“Our goal is to have Milestone become part of every surveillance installation in the world through video technology. From a technology perspective, we are focused on the platform layer and enabling partners to do deeper integration with the system. From a sales and marketing perspective, our focus has been, and will continue to be, to enable our clients, partners and end users, the whole channel, to do easier, more intelligent business,” said Kenneth Hune Petersen, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer at Milestone Systems. “What is science fiction today can be reality tomorrow. All of us are part of this amazing and exciting journey. We want to offer intelligent solutions — solutions beyond security.”

According to Bjorn Skou Eilertsen, Chief Technology Officer of Milestone Systems, Milestone will continue to transform alongside the industry in the year ahead. “We are changing how we think about solutions and products and how we think about our platform. It all starts and ends with the customers in articulating customer needs.” he said.

To accomplish this goal, Milestone created a roadmap for the coming year that will encompass three main pillars: continued investment in its platform offering, introduction of the Milestone Marketplace and the Milestone System Builder. In the process, Milestone will put its focus on three aspects: enabling intelligent systems, aggregating metadata from video technology, and making it discoverable and actionable for fast decision making.

“In the last year, we have increased the number of supported models to 7,000 devices. 1,000 new models were introduced in 2017. In 2018, we will introduce new Husky models with increased software performance and optimized hardware. Milestone recently launched a System Builder Program, a unique open program that enables hardware manufacturers to ship their servers, clients and storage solutions powered by Milestone XProtect software,” shared Petersen.

Set to be launched later this year, the Milestone Marketplace will serve as a new platform that will enable partners, sellers, integrators and shareholders to directly connect with each other and update the software, thus maximizing the business value of the platform.

On the hardware level, Milestone will continue with hardware acceleration — advanced video decoding on the smart client using NVIDIA GPUs. By putting the load off the CPU to the GPU, this allows the system to compute in layers and run software in parallel, driving deep learning models to make sense of all the information. This allows an increase in the processing power of the existing server, improve return on investment (ROI) and provide better video processing, thus accelerating possibilities in video analytics, AI, motion detection, scale of video quality and display of multiple high-resolution cameras cost-efficiently.

Clear vision for an intelligent future

With its defined roadmap for the year ahead coupled with an unwavering focus on building the community through events like MIPS Hanoi, Milestone is positioning itself securely in the industry as it continues to evolve into a more intelligent future. “The most important thing for people to know about Milestone’s commitment to the community is that we invest in things that don’t benefit us directly. Instead, our focus is on the community, as we believe that is where Milestone’s success comes from,” shared Petersen.

Low shared some final thoughts. “Last year we talked about making the world see, defining the future by bringing the partners and innovators together. This year we are taking a closer look at what is ahead. We want to create an intelligent future together by turning video into something that can deliver business value beyond surveillance through AI and other technologies. With the power of the community, we are able to showcase our partners’ global and local community-driven intelligent video solutions to take advantage of these technologies for added value beyond surveillance.”

This article was taken from the March issue (A145) of a&s Asia. For pictures and more information about the event, this issue can be downloaded here.