asmag.com had the opportunity to sit down with Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone Systems, at MIPS Dubai 2022 to gain his insights on the market and how the company is strategizing to tap into new opportunities in security and beyond security.
asmag.com had the opportunity to sit down with Thomas Jensen, CEO of Milestone Systems, at MIPS Dubai 2022 to gain his insights on the market and how the company is strategizing to tap into new opportunities in security and beyond security.
asmag: How do you feel about MIPS Dubai? What would you like the Milestone partners to take away from this event?
Jensen: It’s our first face-to-face event since 2019 and my first event since I started so we are really excited to have this opportunity to meet and be back with our partners. The key takeaway for Milestone partners is that Milestone is growing. We are a video technology software company with huge ambitions. We are a partner-driven company and that means that our partners can expect us to continue to nurture our joint business and to develop business opportunities together. We have a lot of content behind this and also exciting new announcements and launches so we hope the partners will be as excited as we are.
asmag: How do you see the video technology market growing or changing and what would be the key growth drivers? How is Milestone ensuring its open platform stay relevant to this growth and capture new opportunities in security and beyond security?
Jensen: Video technology is growing, with the market increasing 14% year over year. There are a lot of industries beyond security with different dynamics in play right now. The world is going through the aftermath of the global pandemic, inflation is rising and there are increased geopolitical tensions. However, the market is growing and consolidating and we want to take our share of that growth.
When that happens, the element for our core business – safety and security – continues to grow as well. During Covid, we helped create safe environments for people and protect assets. The ability to ensure masking requirements or social distancing became a video task rather than just surveilling whether we were speeding on the streets or crossing the traffic signal for red lights. So, security will continue to evolve within that space.
One element we will be investing in that will be a catalyst of that growth is our open platform. It is our legacy, our future and at the core of how we do video technology. We keep modernizing our platform so it’s more seamless for customers to use and operate our software; more diligence for our partners to integrate and install our software, and bring it further with new APIs for a modernized user experience and interface.
We will also be investing in certain industries where business outcomes will be our focus – we will be looking at the value we can bring to customers and develop our products accordingly. To start with two industries will be the catalyst of these business outcomes - healthcare with a starting focus on hospitals and hospitality with a starting focus on casinos.
Both have been struggling during the pandemic for different reasons. We see video technology as a tool that can support healthcare by making operations more seamless and solving some of the capacity challenges; whereas in hospitality it is to create better experiences for customers and help compulsive gamblers to stay out of casinos.
These are truly some of the ways we are helping our partners: their ability to sell business outcomes. Moving beyond the product and the solution to look at the value we bring forward. We've decided to start with two industries that see massive growth with real-life challenges to solve problems they have at hand and where we believe that our technology can help.
We have ambitions to continue moving beyond that, but want to take a focused approach and demonstrate real outcomes to our customers, before expanding to other industries. Once successful there, we may expand more within the same industry or move into more industries.
asmag: Milestone’s new partner program launched in July this year. Can you explain the rationale behind this move? What should tech partners and customers expect?
Jensen: We did this because we realized we had become an “everything for everybody” company. It didn’t help our customers or our partners who are creating value. It became difficult to identify who can help in a certain industry or situation.
So, the first thing we did was to refresh our partner landscape by focusing our attention on the Milestone specialists. Selling video technology is actually a very complicated ecosystem and a difficult product to integrate. To ensure that customers get the maximum value out of it, we have now designed our program to encapsulate those partners that have the expertise to create great customer experiences.
The second thing we did was remove partners that were not aligned with our business direction and vision. This gives our remaining partners a better market to compete for and where they're really competing for value rather than product sales.
Thirdly, we have incorporated a growth bonus – a growth accelerator for our partners. We have massive ambitions that Milestone, over the next five years, will more than double our business. And of course, we want our partners to double their business as well.
asmag: Milestone has always emphasized a “people-first” approach. How has this been reflected in your business and product roadmap?
Jensen: “People First” is at the core of everything we do, both towards our colleagues but definitely also towards our partners and customers. It’s ingrained in the way that we hire people, where we hire for value and for culture.
We also believe that our technology should serve humankind better. We have an initiative around responsible technology which is equally important because that's also a “people first” approach. We're really putting extra focus on how our product is being developed, how we allow our partners to sell it, but also how we allow our customers to use our product. Because back to our discussion about healthcare data, privacy is something that's really important for our citizens, the ability to know that the companies with whom you work for are honoring human rights that are treating people with respect, and so forth.
We are also building in more and more principles on the responsibility side, such as training our software developers how to avoid unconscious bias in our programming philosophy. This training will also be extended to our partners on how to sell our products, how we expect our products to be used and what are the dos and don'ts. We will tie ourselves to human rights principles from United Nations and we will do the same for our partners and customers.
We already have very strict regulations around human rights in our end-user license agreements but we will strengthen those. We established a whistleblower portal last year, so if some of our customers are in breach of our principles, we actually have an investigative approach to solving that as well.