Ness Corp. Sees Opportunity in Australia

In recent months, the government and private sector market in Australia has been collapsing, mainly due to an abundance of available products at cheap pricing directly from overseas. Government spending is slower than usual, and the private business sector has slowed. According to Neil Morgan, Product Engineer of Ness Corporation, the domestic market has virtually stopped since December last year.

“Recently there haven’t been many projects. Some state governments have recently changed, and so up to six months ago, most potential projects were shelved. Now, since the change over to the new government, they haven’t announced much spending for projects,” Morgan explained.

When it comes to IP development in Australia, the biggest issue is still internet speed and costs that have hindered growth. “We could be seeing more cloud based systems or at least connectivity, yet the issues have restrained the market,” Morgan said. With the slow adoption of IP, resulting in fewer solutions available, the buying behavior of end users in Australia is product driven. “Buyer market is totally driven by pricing at the moment. Simplified PnP solutions are available, but as everyone knows, a simplified system allows novices to install and setup and this is not the best way to go. Unfortunately, as a recent investigation proved, the internet is full of surveillance systems with default passwords and open networks which are not secured. This is a result of cost driven low security PnP surveillance installs,” Morgan warned.

Surveillance in Australian cities is slowly being adopted mostly by councils in local areas in the cities who have them installed in precincts of higher criminal activity. “What we have seen is that a local government will sponsor shops in these areas to get a system installed and then have full access to the system via the local police. Each system is the same and allows familiarity for the police to view, retrieve, and archive footage needed. Quite a good idea but it is only developing at this state. There are also many reasons why Australia has a lower need for surveillance, mainly because immigration of travelers and refugees are lower. There is far less terrorist and criminal activity here and much less overall population,” explained Morgan.

With the National Broadband Network’s (NBN) construction program plan to connect one third of all Australian premises to the national broadband network by 2017, IP growth is forecasted to grow drastically. “So far, the development of the NBN is slow, but as the infrastructure continues, it will exponentially increase connections as the years go by. This is everyone’s hopes that the speed will increase to allow video surveillance to be utilized much better over the Internet for storage and monitoring,” said Morgan.

Moreover, VCA is still an untapped market in Australia that holds much potential. “I would like to see more intelligence within the surveillance systems, such as analytics and a combination of technologies, virtually like chemical analysis, object detection, thermal, and X-ray scanning at airports for early detection of potential terrorist activity but far less intrusive. So I believe internal software development is the next biggest potential direction for surveillance as it does not require any new technology, just the application of what’s currently available on a different platform and it’s also cost effective. Only when we start combining technology like this will we truly start seeing a really powerful application of analytics in surveillance,” Morgan said.