Lars Thinggaard is one of the most experienced Chief Executive Officers in the video management systems business, having been at the helm of Milestone Systems for over 15 years. We caught up with him at the Milestone Integration Platform Symposium (MIPS) event in Las Vegas, USA recently to find out where he thinks the market will be moving next.
“There is a clear trend to go for the cloud, ease of use, usability, portability, and it’s evident that’s going to happen in our business,” he said. “It’s not happening here yet for a variety of reasons but I’m sure it will be there.”
Are end users nervous about delivering their images to the cloud, then?
“That’s part of the reason and there’s bandwidth constraints – it’s really the whole scaling of the thing,” he said. For that reason, he believes that the first adopters will be smaller users, adding that in his view, the cloud for big enterprises is about five to 10 years away.”
Turning to the issue of portability, he believes that this is another trend waiting to be developed in the video surveillance industry.
“We have a lot on our plate in terms of directions where we can go. Let me give you a couple of perspectives on this. When I presented to the President and CEO of Canon I said, why don’t we do something on the visual services side that would be applicable to a soccer player wearing a camera so I could subscribe on my mobile device for the view from Ronaldo, etc, and that could generate a lot of commercial opportunities. Visual services concepts go way beyond security.”
“Beyond that we believe that Visual Business Intelligence will be an important concept in the future. The ability to add visual data to business processes will lead to a whole new class of business software. It is important to recognize that digital video is also data. Combined with metadata, new fields of integration and usability open up. You have to have a digital mind set.”
“Digital video is a data source like all other data sources in IT infrastructure. This means that video data can be fed to other IT systems since true open VMS (video management software) can function as a digital video hub, not only feeding video data to other IT systems, but also integrating business functions.”
“One of the major challenges that I face as a leader and CEO of this company is to choose the focus for successful ideas, because the plate is full of opportunity.”
Ease of use continues to be a hallmark of the Milestone products, he said. “The feedback that I continue to get is on the ease of use of the platform, that’s something that people really appreciate. And I think also that what we’ve seen on stage today in the access control presentation is really great, to see it being this capable SDK that we provide to bring a variety of access control vendors into the Milestone interface,” he said.
“Open platform means that the partner easily can extend and enhance the software into a total integrated solution to fulfil each customer’s needs. This gives agility, and agility means fast go-to market abilities. Just what is needed in this fast-moving world.”
“It is important that our business philosophy is based on openness, giving partners access to all relevant information. And openness is a two-way street: By being open for our partners, you also have to be open about their business. We do an annual partner survey and work more closely than ever to gain their feedback about current and coming needs.”
Links
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