Winners and Losers Fall 2011
Now that the dust has settled from the new announcements of the last month, we can better understand the impact on the overall video surveillance market.
Activity was fairly low and unimpressive. This is, by far, the worst recent turnout (compare to our review of Spring 2011, Fall 2010 and Spring 2010 results).
By contrast to the previous few year's sweeping megapixel product introductions and declining prices, this quarter's announcements show no huge shifts. The new announcements this Fall were scattered and mostly incremental improvements.
Trends
While we did not see any major trend shifts, a few interesting ones look to be emerging:
- Winner - 'Super Sized' megapixel cameras: Buyers like big numbers and manufacturers are responding with quite a number of new 10MP+ cameras such as Arecont's 20MP SurroundView, Avigilon's 29MP HD Pro camera, Dallmeier's 51MP Panomera and ipConfigure's Gigapixel camera.
- Loser - Cash crunched companies: The slowing overall economy and increased investor fears are starting to cause issues for surveillance companies especially those struggling with profitability. We believe this is what happening with recent cutbacks/changes for Cisco, GVI, IQinVision and Pivot3. Certainly, there are others facing similar risks that will shortly surface as well.
- Loser - AVHS Partners: The old guard integrators (ADT, Navco, Niscayah, etc.) seem to be flooding toward's Axis's AVHS hosted video program despite weak ROI, a crippled product and re-selling of the same damn thing. This is a desperate move that is likely to end badly.
More Winners and Losers
Inside the Pro section, we will examine more winners and losers in detail taking a look at the following companies:
- Avigilon
- Arecont Vision
- Axis
- Cisco
- D-Link
- DVTel
- Genetec
- ipConfigure
- Intransa
- Immervision
- IQinVision
- HDcctv Alliance
- Milestone
- Mobotix
- NLSS
- ObjectVideo
- Pelco
- Sony
- Verint
- VideoIQ Intransa - Intransa's 'major' new announcements for the show included certifying Visionhitech's cameras [link no longer available] (don't worry if you do not know who they are, neither did we) and ACTi cube cameras [link no longer available] (huh?). At the show, their performance metric was evidently how many chotchkies they handed out (over 2,000 for the record [link no longer available]). We still cannot figure out their appliance's value proposition. We discussed this at our seminar and the consensus was that there was no real technological difference but that it was a clever sales tool to tell people that their appliances were surveillance optimized.
Mobotix - While Mobotix sales remain strong, their new product development limps along. Their major show announcement was marginal improvements to their horrible VMS clients. The lack of innovation and the determination to stand alone (no ONVIF, no H.264) inevitably will result in declining market share.
ObjectVideo - ObjectVideo really has been quiet with the big news being their VP of Product Management quitting to join Prism Skylabs and OV announcing a deal with NVR for ATMs. There was one announced surveillance partnership a number of months ago and none since. Ultimately, only one thing counts for OV - winning the ITC investigation. If that happens, they may have the last laugh.
Verint - Verint made two notable surveillance announcements at the show - incremental enhancements to their retail video analytics [link no longer available] and, I kid you not, a press release summarizing their 5 awards [link no longer available]. Hiding behind literally a wall of awards of questionable to no value is innnovative, even for this industry. In fairness, many people enjoy being duped by such nonsense awards. This may make them a winner in the eyes of the naive but not us.