Brian Song, MD of Europe at IDIS, highlights several factors that are driving the European security market.
Brian Song, MD of Europe at IDIS, highlights several factors that are driving the European security market:
- Economic climate: Europe's economic downturn has pushed organizations harder to reduce costs and drive efficiencies across security operations and we responded with an affordable state-of-art full HD surveillance solution that delivers tangible value.
- Threat perception: The European security threat perception remains high. The threat of terrorism still looms large while large parts of Europe have experienced natural disasters such as flooding. In addition, crime remains an issue in terms of low-level theft, certainly with retail shrinkage at an all-time high in some regions. We have vandalism, trespassing, violent political protests, and the continued increase in fraud, cyber-threats, and organized crime. It goes hand in hand that when faced with increased risk businesses need to upgrade security.
- Regulation and compliance: Thirdly, and often in response to the security threat, is the high-level of regulation and compliance both European-wide as well as at industry- and country-specific levels. Organizations regularly look to technology to improve and/or achieve compliance, and in many cases, surveillance is part of that mix if you consider for example health and safety laws and HD surveillance offers a superior proposition to the many legacy systems in place today.
- Automation: In addition, there are other more security-industry specific drivers at play. European business owners are looking for a greater level of automation with a move away from intensive human operation. Intelligent surveillance and remote monitoring enables businesses to streamline manned guarding while improving security at the same time.
- Interoperability and integration: We also see a European trend towards a higher degree of integration between equipment, systems and services especially since the cost of human resources increases and a typical man guard costing upwards of US$100,000 per annum in some major cities. There is now a holistic view of security operations to optimize the interaction between systems and manpower. Therefore, we are addressing the interoperability of people with technology as well as the integration of disparate systems. By offering simplicity in terms of installation, configuration and the intuitive user interface of our solution leads to faster and lower cost implementation and the improved effectiveness and even reduction of manned security.
- Intelligent data: European businesses are also focusing on the “softer” elements of security in terms of the information collected and how this is leveraged and used across not just the security department but beyond. We are seeing an increase in retailers using surveillance to improve marketing and sales initiatives through football and buyer behavior. To realize the wider potential of surveillance, these companies are looking to upgrade to full HD. This data fusion also ties in with integration as businesses look for a single view of the security operation to make data more intuitive in order to respond faster and more intelligently to incidents, and share information with the emergency services as required.
- Fragmented marketplace: All the while, the European security market remains fragmented across the entire continent, meaning we need to continue to develop and deliver channel-marketing strategies and tangible benefits across distributors, installers, integrators, end-users big or small, consultants, and other specifiers. Our model is not a one-size-fits-all — we are committed to a strong partnership approach to deliver value across the entire security supply chain. By offering hubs and switching, we also simplify the buying chain so that distributors, installers, and end users do not have to look to the IT industry when they need to build a networked HD surveillance solution.