Network Optix (Nx) - a relative newcomer to the IP video market - is insistent on making IP video accessible to any industry and seems to be having some success doing it. How? By focusing on 3 main tenets when developing their flagship video management product, Nx Witness.
Network Optix (Nx) - a relative newcomer to the IP Video market - is insistent on making IP video accessible to any industry and seems to be having some success doing it. How? By focusing on 3 main tenets when developing their flagship video management product, Nx Witness.
Below we review the 3 tenets that drive the strategy for how the product is being developed - and why Nx thinks IP video has a bright future outside of confines of the security vertical.
#1 - Expect users to have zero IP video experience.
While IP video has traditionally been the technology of the security and surveillance industry, Nx believes the ever-decreasing cost of camera hardware - driven by companies like
Hikvision Digital Technology and
Dahua Technology - combined with the ever-increasing power of cost-effective server, networking, and storage solutions is making IP video an attractive technology to many new industries.
“We have this concept at Nx - that we need to develop with the expectation that the software we produce should be
instantly usable to any new user. The Nx Witness auto-discovery mechanism, for example, almost instantly discovers thousands of devices from hundreds of manufacturers to remove as much pain as possible during setup for users new to IP video.
We also recently added a cloud layer to our architecture and now users have the ability to login to their systems from anywhere, anytime, using only their email address and password and to share access with other users. It’s a minor thing, really, but it was the simplest, most useful first set of features we could implement that would really save users a ton of time while also making the system more accessible to first-time IP Video users,” said Tony Luce, Director of Sales and Marketing of Business Development at Network Optix.
#2 - There is no fundamental difference between security and other verticals in terms of how they can make use of IP video
The Network Optix team is pretty insistent that the core value of any live video streaming system - whether it’s a social networking streaming platform, a production monitoring system, or a health and safety application - remains the same.
“The core value of any live video platform or software is that it is raises the situational awareness of the user. It allows users to reach out and really grasp what is happening in their domain in real time, whether it’s a single door to hundreds of sites spread around the globe.
A great example of this tenet being applied is the addition of the Chromium browser to the Nx Witness v3.0 Desktop app. Users now have the ability to browse the web inside Nx Witness. Why? Because people spend 80% of their time in the browser as today’s management and documentation systems move to the cloud. People - no matter who they are - need the ability to combine information as they see fit - and the browser really brings a whole new level of customization to information aggregation at the individual user level,” said Luce.
#3 - Video is never the ONLY solution. It’s PART of the solution.
“We see a lot of competitors these days that seem to be trying to create product portfolios that encompass nearly every security and surveillance product type out there - access control, alarm monitoring, IP video, analog video, HDTV, the list goes on.
And we at Nx get the concept. But from what we observe in the overall tech trends, we think the focus on adding more features and products to an already complex product offering - which is what many companies seem to do - isn’t the answer to growth for the IP Video industry. Just as Google seeks to increase the total number of people on the Internet to grow their addressable market size, what we’re focusing on as a company is bringing the core value of IP Video into new industries and to grow through enabling innovation in those new markets.
That forces us to think, as an organization, about how to design and implement features in the most universally useful and accessible way possible. In a way that makes it easy to take our product, add an extra integration or a custom web interface, and quickly have a whole new vertical market solution. We want to get a partner 90% of the way to a new product driven by IP Video and have them add the final 10% of specialization - the part that’s really valuable and makes them an expert in their industry. That’s what we think is powerful.” - Tony Luce, Network Optix.
A good example of this type of thinking is apparent in how integrations with Nx Witness work - with a Video Source SDK, a Storage SDK, and a RESTful Server API that lets users develop completely freely their own front-ends or integrations.
With the simplicity of the RESTful API available on the Nx Server application Nx opens the Nx Witness platform up to “integrator developers” in a way that allows people with limited coding knowledge to achieve great results. Sending an event to Nx Witness is as simple as typing out an HTTP string.
And Nx Witness not only has the ability to receive events, filter them, and generate business rules. Nx Witness can also send HTTP PUT and GET requests to 3rd party systems and devices.
Nx has hinted that they will be opening their platform further throughout 2017 - with public API’s for their new Cloud service and even the possibility of a fully open-sourced Nx Desktop app. Keep a close eye on their progress
here.