Budget Offerings
“Affordable” is a marketing buzzword and will remain firmly embedded in 2012's dialogue. Companies that previously targeted enterprise customers are shifting toward SMB buyers, as budgets tighten. “We think it is important to keep our reputation of high-quality products, even if we also address the lower-cost markets,” said Ray Mauritsson, CEO of Axis Communications. “We make sure all of our offerings are professional solutions.”
Leading manufacturers hope to differentiate their products by their brand and not just by cost. Avigilon's offerings include a 29-megapixel camera, but a corner store would not require that much performance nor pixels. “Most surveillance is bad video quality and bad compression,” Fernandes said. “People need fewer features for less deployment, but they want the same thing: a real, clear picture.”
As cost is the primary factor in SMB purchase decisions, demonstrating ROI can turn a grudge purchase into a great benefit for a business, said James Smith, European Marketing Manager at Samsung Techwin. “Increasingly, customers are using our equipment f o r mul t ipl e purpo s e s , such as security, health and safety, monitoring processes and business optimization.”
Fads
Technology holds tantalizing promise ,but can yield disappointment. Biometric identification was to do away with keys, cards and PIN codes, but cost and development hurdles burst its bubble. It is of limited significance for most customers, Illig said.
VCA has suffered bad press, due to overpromising and underdelivering. “This is beginning to change,” Wong said. “A sense of realism and pragmatism emerged in the VCA space. IMS Research forecasts that the market for intelligent video devices will grow at an annual rate of more than 20 percent over the next five years.”
Instead of hype — the notorious example of identifying a terrorist in a crowded airport — VCA emphasizes the practical, such as smart searches through hours of footage. Onboard analytics will benefit from better chipsets with faster processing, which will improve accuracy.
The HD boom makes VCA all the more relevant. Basic algorithms can detect motion and only record in HD during an event, then downscale when nothing is going on. As the catastrophic flooding in Thailand sunk nearly half of worldwide hard drive shipments, storage will become a valuable commodity in 2012. The country accounted for 40 to 45 percent of worldwide production in the first half of 2011, which will slow computer and hard-drive shipments, said IDC in a November 2011 report. “Growth for 2012 is anyone's guess, but it should be the year of harvest for HD,” said Keiki Warashina, Acting Sales Manager, Industrial Optics Business Unit, Tamron. The company will roll out 8- and 10-megapixel lenses in 2012 for better image quality and cost control.
The emergence of HD-SDI has been embraced by incumbent vendors, although it has been difficult to gauge buyer interest due to limited product availability. More product launches are scheduled for 2012, but it remains unclear whether SDI can overcome storage, processing and distance bottlenecks.
All -Access Pass
Access control lends itself to many applications beyond security, and the proliferation of mobile devices is accelerating that functionality. “Customers are seeking a more seamless experience with their credentials that incorporates the use of many applications in a single card,” said Eric Chiu, Sales Director for China, HID Global (an Assa Abloy company).
Near-field communications for smartphones and the convergence of physical-logical identity platforms are extending the credential's value. “The way we differentiate ourselves is through dedication; we can integrate with video and intrusion, but we are dedicated to secured identity and access control,” Chiu said.
Better integration with business operations further boosts the usefulness of access control. “Gallagher is trying to penetrate toward the high end of the market, offering value to customers outside of just physical security,” Edgecombe said. “We are doing this by developing our products to provide value through integration with business processes, ERP systems, and on-boarding/off-boarding of employees and contractors, and provisioning of people in an organization.”