UAE – Milestone Systems is on a journey towards more integration, according to its Director Middle East, Africa and DACH.
Celebrating its 10th year of exhibiting at Intersec in Dubai, Milestone’s Christian Ringler (pictured) looked towards the future of video management systems. He explained that at the moment, 99 per cent of the company’s supported devices are cameras, but within five years, that could be reduced to as low as 50 per cent, as heat sensors, access control systems and fire suppression equipment increasingly become internet enabled.
Speaking at Intersec, where he gave a keynote speech this year, Ringler said: “At the moment, 99 per cent of our supported devices are cameras, in the next five years, less than 50 per cent of devices will be cameras, the rest are other IoT devices like temperature devices, or maybe access control, or fire systems.”
He added: “That is our main strategy, to open us up much more for IoT devices. You are moving to a IoT pattern. It’s a journey. You have to open the interfaces so that people can integrate their own devices with the network.”
Aside from a focus on improved integration in 2018, Ringler said the company would be looking at new ways to approach other countries, including Saudi Arabia. Milestone has already boosted its presence in the Middle East and Africa in 2017.
Milestone, which is a standalone company within the Canon Group, held its first Dubai-based Milestone Community Day (MIPS) in May, and created a separate seven-person team for Africa, based in Johannesburg.
“We see a lot of growth in this region, and we need to invest in it for the future,” he said, adding that the company faced aggressive competition from Asian and Chinese companies in Africa. Offering e-learning and online certification to partners in the region was one way of convincing clients and educating partners about ways to use Milestone technology, he said.
The Middle East, the Gulf in particular, continues to be an important market, with the only difference between it and other markets, such as Europe, being the size of the project. “In Europe we will often see projects with 100 cameras, but here it could be as many as 1,000,” said Ringler.
He continued: “Our main focus is to continue what we started in 2017, we want to focus on having the right re-sellers, the right system integrators, and working much more closely with end users, we are getting in touch with end users in specific areas.”
The company would continue to focus on better integration between systems, he said, adding that as an open platform the idea is to build up a standard features and standard functionalities, while Milestone creates their own definitions of what is needed in the market.
