asmag.com had a chance to sit down with Thomas Jensen, CEO, and Rahul Yadav, CTO of Milestone Systems during ISC West. In this discussion, we spoke about Milestone marking its 25th anniversary year in the industry and recent news that the company achieved double-digit revenue growth in 2022.
asmag.com had a chance to sit down with Thomas Jensen, CEO, and Rahul Yadav, CTO of Milestone Systems during ISC West. In this discussion, we spoke about Milestone marking its 25th anniversary year in the industry and recent news that the company achieved double-digit revenue growth in 2022.
Milestone financial report and company strategy
Milestone recently reported a record annual net revenue of approximately US$220.6 million (1.5 billion DKK) in 2022, a 30 percent increase compared to the year before. News that showed the company is on track with its ambitious goal to double its 2021 revenue by 2026.
Speaking on the company’s growth strategy, Jensen shared, “Our initiative is two-fold – organic growth heavily skewed on deliberate investment in our technology stack and innovation, and investment in our sales organization. We have more than doubled our sales organizations in the US in the past 18 months. The year before that, in our Asian and European sales force. And that gave us 30 percent rapid growth last year. The market is consolidating among top 5 to 6 players and we expect to take our fair share of it.”
The vast majority of growth came from their core markets, with all three global regions showing double-digit growth. Jensen said, “We want to stress that innovation is one thing we take seriously in our open platform and technology. At the same time, we are very laser-focused on delivering on our core promises to our customers – an open platform that is reliable, stable and secure.”
When asked about the momentum behind the growth, Jensen attributed it to two important factors. “First of all, our open platform and technology partners whom we collaborated with to solve specific use cases in the market. Secondly, we take a business outcome approach where we put the customer first,” he said.
And these, according to Yadav, are key differentiators that set Milestone apart in the VMS market. “What is interesting in the security industry is the focus, even obsession, on solutions and products. But these should not be regarded as the end but rather as a means to an end. Like for example, customers don’t really want the cloud as a standalone product. What they want are easier solutions and the ability to achieve business outcomes through the products we deliver,” said Yadav.
It is with this directive in mind that Milestone continues to move further into analytics, building a data-driven video technology software environment both within security applications and beyond. “What we see as the next big things are security, compliance and analytics that tell you what is going on in the video. On top of this is how we can interpret user patterns and data in video to create insights or prescriptive applications, allowing users to get the maximum value or business outcomes from their video operations. That is the industry trend that we see and the reason why we are going beyond security,” said Yadav.
“We have a continuous focus on building new use cases, such as in healthcare where we help free up personnel to improve patient care. Las Vegas is a key showcase for Milestone. We have many use cases here in casinos, education, law enforcement and the municipality,” added Jensen.
This has also influenced the company’s overall product strategy. “We try to understand first what we can solve for the customer, their biggest pain points and if there are use cases for video. Then we see if they’re willing to use video and pay the cost of having an advanced video system. Finally, we see if Milestone has the ability to solve the customer problem. It is important to us that we are able to create that value and bring it to the market,” Jensen said.
This line of thinking has led to a restructuring of its reseller partner program. In July 2022, Milestone went down from 11,000 partners to approximately 8,100 partners. This number is set to drop down even further to 3,500 to 4,500 partners in the next few years as the company seeks to optimize the channel.
From a product perspective, Milestone aims to focus on maintaining a stable platform as well as developing features that make sense to the customers. “We want to focus on the mid-market customers (50+ cameras) and make our platform easier for them to operate and deploy. For XProtect, we put a lot of effort on our responsible technology initiatives. We are developing training programs for our software developers on how to avoid unconscious bias in software development and applications like people identification. We also placed more effort on how and who we sell to and what use cases we accept as technology and analytics advances,” said Jensen.
Milestone product updates and pipeline
Milestone’s big product announcement this year is the launch of Milestone Kite (powered by Arcules), a move that enabled the company a unique opportunity to offer the market an on-premise solution, a cloud-hosted solution through AWS, a hybrid solution via a system add-on product called “Interconnect” and now a full-cloud VMS solution.
According to Jensen, this broad portfolio gives customers the flexibility to choose the right VMS for their applications and achieve business outcomes, instead of being tied in and forced to choose what is available. “This freedom of choice and customer centricity is really crucial in terms of how we position ourselves as a player in the market,” added Jensen.
Currently available in the US and EMEA, the Milestone Kite cloud solution is set to roll out later this year in APAC as well.
CTO Yadav also shared details about Milestone’s current product roadmap which is centered around modernizing Milestone’s open platform architecture. This includes updating the APIs and gateways for easier connection to the platform, the already launched AI bridge to integrate AI and ML applications with Milestone XProtect VMS, and launching a cloud application of the XProtect Management Client.
“This year marks Milestone’s 25th anniversary in the industry and that’s something that we are immensely proud of. We believe that Milestone will be in the forefront of the industry as it moves from IP and digitized to data-driven and analytics-driven video technology. This will be a very important year for us,” said Jensen.