VMS advances for added value in the Middle East

Airports, smart city and public spaces have had the most activity in terms of video surveillance solutions. Increasing regional requirements have led to an increase in end user demands for new advanced features and the need to consolidate several different platforms under one VMS umbrella.

 "We can see that people want to deploy more cameras with a open VMS platform like Milestone. We are creating a platform that allows people to deploy huge numbers of cameras. That’s the trend we have seen in 2017. In the future we will see that VMS software will also become a platform for integration of sensors and IoT devices,” said Christian Ringler, Director for Middle East, Africa and DACH at Milestone Systems.

As camera counts and complexity of video surveillance projects continue to rise in the region, the need for a platform to manage all these cannot be overlooked.

“There has been an increasing need for Enterprise class VMS solutions over the last few years in Middle East. The Ministry of Interior (MOI) have been implementing VMS solutions across various departments and but they aren’t always necessarily interoperable and haven’t been integrated. They have a need to manage all these systems from a central command and control center and that’s where we come in,” said Harri Rantanen, Regional Director for Middle East and Africa at Teleste.

Rantanen added, “We have good solutions for these individual VMS islands but typically the complexity increases significantly when you try to interconnect them seamlessly. The ability of the VMS solutions to scale up from an island of some 100s to 1000s to tens of thousands of channels consisting of multiple VMS solutions from different vendors. The market trend that we see is the government sector needing to have an overall view across multiple different departments and stakeholders to ensure safe and smooth public security.”

Today’s advanced VMS software often feature open architectures, enabling the creation of enterprise level solutions that can expand the applications of existing systems beyond traditional use.

"We at Teleste have the VMS, S-VMX, which is based on open standard interfaces and being an engineering company we integrate to other VMS solutions. Equally important the VMS platform needs to be capable of integrating with other subsystems like video analytics, access control systems, radar systems and so forth. Our approach is that we focus on the video, the brain of the system, and we let the customers decide which best of the breed other sub-systems they want to use,” continued Rantanen.

Artificial intelligence has been a hot topic for the industry and it is no different for video surveillance. However, without the right platform and software to analyze this, this data will remain useless. Many users are now looking toward means to utilize the data for more intelligence.

“Another future trend is of course AI and machine intelligence. There is a lot of video data being recorded today. You will need to find the right intelligent tools to enable you to handle the issues better and faster even identifying potential issues before they happen. Many end users haven’t yet realized the return on investment (ROI) from these new abilities, but this will soon be a topic and trend for the future. With our platform approach and community, we are well positioned in this area,” said Ringler.