Hello from Denmark. Open VMS platform company Milestone is holding its annual MIPS Europe conference in Copenhagen this week and members of the press, including myself, were invited to attend.
The message from the management, delegates and invited guests has been extremely positive. According to Milestone and its partners:
• The economy may be suffering but orders are up
• Milestone continues to dominate the market
• The partnership programme – or the Milestone Ecosystem as they like to call it – is flourishing even as it’s being restructured to take account of growth.
According to president and CEO Lars Thinggaard, Milestone growth has outstripped the market average for the past several years and his plan is to continue to “outgrow the market”.
He said that the IP CCTV market is growing faster than the analogue market and, significantly, the value of the IP CCTV sector will exceed analogue sales very soon.
According to IMS Research, Milestone is number one in the video management systems (VMS) market so it’s well positioned to capitalise on this market shift.
The message from Milestone is that its partners will benefit, too.
In his keynote presentation delivered to a packed auditorium of over 200 manufacturer and installer partners, Thinggaard said that because of its partner programme, Milestone was more than a small company of 300 staff based in Denmark.
It is a “virtual organisation”, he said, comprising over 450 Solution Partners with 8000 staff.
Thursday’s agenda also included presentations from Intel, mergers and acquisition specialist Alper Cetingok of Morgan Keegan, consultant Matia Grossi talking about video surveillance as a cloud-based service, Simon Harris of IMS Research and case studies from New Zealand and Sweden.
Product launches
Breaking news at the conference was the announcement of two product releases: XProtect® Professional 8 with “the power to do more for mid-size businesses”, and XProtect Express, a brand new product designed to enable small businesses to deploy video surveillance more easily.
“Milestone now has an even stronger and more competitive family of open platform IP video management software, offering more options from the world’s leading solution provider: deeper functionality, fast and flexible installations, and affordability. We are excited to reveal our new product XProtect Express, and the latest updates to the XProtect product suite,” said Lars Gudbrandsson, head of product management at Milestone Systems.
The company says that XProtect Express is a new addition to the product line. Supporting up to 48 cameras on a single server, it offers speedy VMS integration for small businesses such as retail. Due to the open platform environment, businesses can seamlessly integrate solutions such as point-of-sale or video analytics directly into the XProtect Smart Client, for a common interface and unified operating system.
Editor’s comment
For a grumpy old git like myself, MIPS has been downright depressing! Where’s the bad news?
To paraphrase Shakespeare, you should always be able to find something rotten in the state of Denmark, right?
The morning was kicked off by director of sales operations Lawrence De Guzman, the MC for the day, introducing Eric Fullerton, chief sales and marketing officer.
From the start, it was clear the company was going to try to subdue its audience of 200+ partners (and smattering of media) with a charm offensive. Were they genuinely ebullient or was it a devious plan to bury the bad news?
Apparently there is no bad news. Speaker after speaker delivered unremittingly positive messages. Even the questions from the audience were positive.
There were a few technical hitches and the schedule had to be rapidly reorganised when one of the key speakers – Martin Gren of Axis Communications – got stuck in a traffic jam on the bridge from Sweden, but the mood overall was bullish.
Everyone in the room seemed confident in the product and ready to go out and make money.
There will be more about MIPS on Monday.
