The VMS market is growing and data-driven video technology is the future. Milestone Systems, a global leader in open platform software and analytics, seeks to capitalize on these market opportunities in security and beyond with its new cloud offering and industry solutions.
Over the past few years, Milestone was able to retain its position as a leading global VMS provider (number one in APAC and EMEA), grow in revenue and people through investing in the right technology and growing their partner community despite the challenges posed by the pandemic.
In this year’s invite-only Milestone Partner Summit (MIPS) in Dubai, Milestone shared their ambition to more than double their revenue in the next five years and gave partners an exclusive preview of their strategy to “Build the New Next” and product roadmap.
Milestone to target opportunities with latest product launches
1. Milestone enters Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS) space with first pure cloud offering – Milestone Kite (2023)
“We believe that cloud is on the rise and that cloud adoption will increase over the coming years. Therefore, it’s important for us to also have a cloud offering, an on-premise offering and hybrid offerings for the customer that needs both. We even have a hosted solution with AWS, and I’m proud to announce that from 2023, we will have Milestone Kite powered by Arcules. Going forward, Milestone will cover all four aspects of the industry from a VMS perspective,” said Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone Systems in his keynote speech.
According to Jensen, the ability to offer both on-premise and cloud will create new market opportunities. “That gives us the ability to help small business owners with fewer camera needs, but also the large-sized businesses with a lot of dispersed sites better suited for cloud offerings,” said Jensen.
2. Milestone industry-specific solutions focused on business outcomes (2023)
Healthcare solution (hospitals)
The decision to start with healthcare first is quite easily understood as there’s an imminent need in the industry with nurse shortages and lack of time for caregivers to take care of patients in hospitals and nursing homes.
“Privacy is a major concern in healthcare, both data privacy and individual privacy. With technology, we will be able to deliver non-intrusive video solutions where we both protect patient safety and privacy while alerting the staff to incidents. In these cases, every minute saved can save lives or mitigate the effect of long-term injuries,” said Jensen.
The feature referred to here is the privacy blur on XProtect that allow hospitals to apply or remove blurs per camera in real time directly through the client interface.
Hospitality solution (casinos)
Casinos are required by law to install video cameras and enforce mandatory self-exclusion lists to deny compulsive gamblers access to the venue. “The product here would be video technology combined with facial recognition. The solution is keeping compulsive gamblers out of the casino, but the true business outcome here is helping casinos meet the legal requirements of the countries in which they operate. It's to support society, to reduce gambling addictions and help compulsive gamblers,” said Jensen.
Milestone to become even more data-driven
Data has become the most valuable asset of any organization or city. The future battleground and competition will revolve around data collection, data quality and the actionable insights that can be derived from it. Milestone is refining their strategy accordingly and plans to continue investing heavily in data and analytics.
Speaking on this, Jensen said, “Video technology software will still be our core and we will continue to develop that. But we will add a new focus as well which is to become more data-driven because everything in technology these days is about data: how to use the data, how to get tangible knowledge out of data and how you can bring value from data to your customers. You will see us continuously investing in data-driven insights so our customers can get maximum value out of their solution.”
Data-driven product strategy
Two recent Milestone XProtect releases were in line with this move for more tangible data-driven insights. One is Milestone’s XProtect Rapid Review powered by Briefcam. Launched last year, the XProtect Rapid Review is an advanced forensic analytics solution that runs on the Milestone VMS platform to enable rapid video review, search and analysis.
The other release is the Milestone XProtect Incident Manager, an add-on for organizations to document incidents and combine them with video and/or audio evidence. Currently available only for Corporate, Incident Manager will be made available to XProtect Expert and Professional+
in the coming months.
Other developments on the Milestone platform
Ongoing developments on the Milestone platform include:
- Move from MIP SDK to more modern MIPS APIs to make it easier for tech partners to build on XProtect and to enable on-premise XProtect to connect to the cloud
- Development of AI bridge to serve as an API gateway for XProtect for seamless communication between XProtect and smart analytics (which are primarily Linux-based).
- Better device integration and driver framework to enable integration with any camera or system.
Modernizing the architecture will enable Milestone users to have three cloud choices: XProtect on AWS, Milestone Kite and cloud-managed XProtect (a cloud-enabled management client that will offer users new functionalities like real-time monitoring and management).
Additionally, Milestone plans to introduce single sign-on on the mobile and web client and biometric access for mobile clients.