After having seen a significant rise in security concerns in 2015, the year 2016 will see an increased focus on intelligence, as organizations take proactive measures to identify and mitigate threats, according to Keith Bloodworth, CEO of CNL Software.
After having seen a significant rise in security concerns in 2015, the year 2016 will see an increased focus on intelligence, as organizations take proactive measures to identify and mitigate threats, according to Keith Bloodworth, CEO of CNL Software.
Speaking in an executive interview, Bloodworth added that while traditional markets like the U.S. and Europe are steadily expanding, investments are taking place at a much rapid pace in emerging regions like India, China and the Middle East.
“2015 has seen the rise of more terrorist related tension in the Middle East, in Europe and now in the USA,” he said. “Together with the understanding of having joined up security systems, it is driving up the need for increased situational awareness. Demand by government agencies and major global cities for large-scale centralized operations to deal with major incidents are growing rapidly.”
But with an increasing commoditization of hardware, and several mergers and acquisitions, the security industry is seeing some new players entering the market. These new entrants are forcing traditional systems integrators (SI) to compete with lower margins and higher volumes, creating new challenges for SIs to be part of the value chain, as they may have to invest heavily in IT skills.
“As a result of margin erosion, hardware for most security applications, is rapidly becoming a commodity,” Bloodworth said. “Markets have seen significant consolidation of VMS and camera manufacturers. Following on from Tyco acquiring Exacq and Canon acquiring Milestone, M&A highlights in 2015 include the Hanwha partial acquisition of Samsung Techwin, Canon’s acquisition of Axis Communications, Panasonic acquiring VideoIQ, and most recently FLIR’s acquisition of DVTEL. The ‘old’ world order in security is gone and a new set of global players are arriving.”
Looking ahead to 2016, his company expects to see more investment in technology to offset spending cuts to manpower, especially in critical verticals like homeland security. Several governments lack funds to singlehandedly manage security, and this could prompt public and private sector to work closer than ever-before.
“With the continually increasing diversity of security threats across the globe, 2016 will see the emergence of closer integration between all systems within the security disciplines that make up intelligence security management,” Bloodworth said.
Intelligent information would play a key role in dealing with security issues in the coming days. Eventually, with the increased emphasis on intelligent data, having the right tools to take advantage of the information and eliminate threats would become a major driver of market demand.