Intelligence is supercharging video intelligence. The Asia Pacific region has evolved to become a major growth driver in the video technology market. According to IHS Markit, Asia accounted for the greater part of the global professional security market in 2016, with China, Japan and India making up three of the top five countries in terms of market share.
Milestone Systems is a global industry leader in open platform IP video management software. The company recognized the opportunities in the region early on, and has already established a strong foothold in Asia. “I think that 2017 was extremely positive. We saw growth in all markets across APAC. We see continued high potential in India, Indochina and Australia,” said Benjamin Low, VP for Asia Pacific (APAC) at Milestone Systems. “Indochina, in particular, has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. Technology has taken us forward enormously over the past years and looking ahead, the next five to 10 years will be crucial in redefining the future of technology.”
“The complexity and requirements of the current security landscape and customer expectations are accelerating fast. Milestone is working on lowering the hurdles for adopting its solutions and offering its partners with more solutions in different verticals,” added Low.
Over the past year, there was an emerging awareness in the channel about the possibilities of delivering value-added solutions beyond security. “From an APAC perspective, the majority of our partners are still doing traditional security projects, but more and more do not want to compete in a saturated area; they want to escape the ‘race to the bottom’ that many others in the industry are seeing. For example, Maruti Suzuki in India is using Milestone software and wants to incorporate facial recognition and CRM integration within the platform,” said Low.
“Overall, I feel a growing maturity in the market in terms of what the channel is expecting. We see that the partners are looking at vertical growth and partnering with Milestone allows them to focus on a specific area. The solution partners also mature in the way they go to market as they are looking for both integration and reach to the customer base.” Low added.
Transformation of the Video Industry
Continuous technological advancements in the industry are driving the customers to demand more from their vendors. “We are at an inflection point in the industry. The concept of intelligence is changing. Machines with human-level intelligence are being improved, and the market pressure continues to rise with increasing demand from customers for more intelligent solutions. That is the driver behind our strategy to deliver more value beyond security together with our partners,” said Low.
Bjørn Skou Eilertsen, Chief Technology Officer of Milestone Systems, concurred that the video surveillance industry is undergoing a huge transformation. “Devices and sensors are being connected and aggregated. As a community, we will have enormous data sets to work with as a result. All the devices will have embedded information and intelligence, and the data sets will represent everything around us. The industry is headed towards the use of aggregated video and sensor information for automation — leveraging the data and making autonomous systems that reduce human intervention. Further down the road, we will see the autonomous systems provide a new level of augmented intelligence, amplifying the decision making beyond human capabilities,” said Eilertsen.
Bjørn Skou Eilertsen,
Chief Technology Officer,
Milestone Systems
The difficulty now lies not in obtaining the data, but rather in using data to drive business outcomes. “The acceptance of video technology as part of our lives is on the rise. We see a positive inclination to IP surveillance systems spurred by technology innovation, real-time access (getting immediate intelligence from data), video analytics for business productivity, and government initiatives like the Smart Nation in Singapore,” Eilertsen added.
In this intelligent world, more and more devices will be connected, generating even larger amounts of data, and this is where machine intelligence come into the picture. It is nearly impossible for a human being to keep track of all this data on various video monitoring screens but by combining machine intelligence with human judgment, it becomes easier to identify specific incidents, thus saving time and resources as well.
According to Eilertsen, these advances in intelligent solutions are made possible by the enhancement in hardware features, such as GPUs delivering exponentially more computing capacity and the adoption of machine learning as the preferred way to provide intelligent applications.
“In 2018 to 2019, the aim is to enable the community to deliver intelligent solutions. Milestone will expand the device driver frameworks to better include IoT devices and sensors to enable partners to aggregate more video and sensor data,” Eilertsen added.
To make use of the aggregated video, Milestone will bring to market a Video Processing Service that will leverage the new GPU and machine learning compute capabilities and enable all community partners to build dedicated AI applications directly on the Milestone platform. These investments in the community will radically simplify the development and rollout of machine learning enabled applications to deliver intelligent solutions. These intelligent solutions have to adapt to the way people work.
“In order to support this, Milestone will bring to market a mobile SDK enabling community partners and customers to make a mobile application and deliver their intelligent solution directly to the phone or tablet. Finally, to stress the importance of cybersecurity and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the age of connected devices, Milestone strives to achieve industry certification for the Milestone Video Platform, specifically for data privacy,” Eilertsen said.
The intelligence derived from videos can be used by users to tap into the massive business potential in the market. If security can be re-envisioned from being a cost center to a business enabler, this will transform it into a return of investment (ROI) generator and make the entire process more intelligent. Hence, Milestone’s focus moving forward will be to empower the whole partner channel to do easier and more intelligent business.
To cross this hurdle, Milestone intends to invest even more in its platform to create better and scalable technology for all its partners and stakeholders. “We will continue to make our technology easier to use through better training, improved interaction with partners as well as initiatives like the Milestone Marketplace and the System Builder. These are the two initiatives I find most exciting in the coming year,” Low concluded.
Empowering the Platform and the Community
The industry is in the midst of change and Milestone is clearly spearheading this. By moving away from a business model of simply pushing out new product features and focusing on strengthening the platform, Milestone has created a growing community of partners that has become the driving force for continuous growth and innovation for the company. This will no doubt push Milestone further in the forefront of a more intelligent future in the industry.