IMS on Video Surveillance Trends

IMS Research's Simon Harris offers a series of observations and recommendations on video surveillance trends in a recent interview with Milestone Systems [link no longer available].

Three comments we found to be especially interesting:

• "A rich feature set is good, but at the end of the day the more important aspect is the product has to be reliable." This parallels results found in IMS' security integrator survey [link no longer available]. Nonetheless, it does seem counterintuitive. Products whose use is increasing the quickest tend to be less mature and reliable than established products (e.g., megapixel cameras vs analog). This is not a criticism of megapixel - simply the nature of newer vs older technologies. Even in a conservative market like security, growth is almost always found in the sacrifice of some reliability for much greater performance. Beyond this, the revealed preference for most of the industry seems to be that brand is the most important aspect of the product if only because of their sales success.
• "Megapixels and H.264 are more important than analytics. However, analytics is a trend that is not going to go away." This sentiment is widely expressed by industry people.
• "We advise companies to go towards the open platform approach and ecosystem business model." While lots of companies praise openness, so many of the biggest companies in the market continue to release and promote bundles. Indeed, Milestone is somewhat of a contrarian relative to the dozens of large players promoting their own bundles. There seems to be a role for a range of options from totally open to tightly closed with more closed solutions offering lower cost and simplicity at the low end and greater performance at the high end (because performance can be tightly controlled).