IPVM turns 10 years old today.

10 years ago, IPVM was an experiment. Today, it is the largest and most read publication in our industry.

I wanted to thank our members and contributors, looking back at where we came and ahead to where IPVM is going.

IPVM's Mission

The industry is increasingly dominated by corporate conglomerates and the Chinese government who have the power and means to push their agenda to the detriment of the industry, as a whole, and integrators and buyers generally.

IPVM's mission, grounded in our testing and research, is to be a counter-force to that, providing fundamental technical information and exposing vendor problems.

Thank You To Our Diverse Membership

Core to what we do is our diverse global membership. A critical problem is that media and research organizations are so financially beholden to a small number of manufacturers that they self-censor critical coverage of them. By contrast, IPVM is still the only organization in our industry funded by small payments from thousands and thousands of different organizations, providing us the independence to speak out. A few years back, we generated a map that gives a sense of how diverse IPVM members are:

We literally have members from Kansas to Kenya to Kuala Lumpur to Kazakhstan.

Thank You To Our Contributors And Commenters

Another major thank you goes to the thousands of people who have commented on IPVM. There are ~200,000 comments on IPVM articles and discussions. Not only is the sheer number of comments amazing for this industry, but the insights, debates and opposing viewpoints shared are critical. In an industry where communication is so constrained by corporate forces, having a lively and contrarian forum, especially against IPVM, on IPVM, is very valuable. We thank you all.

Looking Back

2008 was a different era. In an era of free trade magazines, before streaming Netflix, before newspapers charged online, the consensus was that 'information wants to be free'. Now, people are increasingly realizing if you are not the customer, you are the product. Free media favors their advertisers, not their consumers.

Being a bootstrapped company, never taking any funding nor debt whatsoever, building IPVM was challenging, especially since there was no template about how to build such a company or what to offer. Over the years, though, we have figured out many things and have been able to combine tests, statistics, reporting, software, courses, criticism, discussions and more into an extremely useful resource.

Looking Forward

Our mission remains. Our resolve is stronger than ever and I feel we are entering our prime, with our largest and best team.

We will continue to call out problems, expose issues and educate on technology. In terms of where we are investing most of our money, it will be to improve our technology research and development, including:

• VMS testing - We have not done enough. We are going to do more, especially to better evaluate and educate on what various features or differentiations are most meaningful.
• Camera testing - We have done hundreds of camera tests but we still need to do more, especially in terms of providing broader analysis and comparison across cameras to better and more clearly explain which cameras are best in which scenarios.
• Software - Our Camera Calculator has been a great success but we definitely need to do more with that. We can also do more tools, including software to help detect industry-specific cyber security vulnerabilities.
• Salespeople - While lots of our reporting helps salespeople, we do not enough to help them apply our technology research to help them fairly and appropriately win deals.
• Installers - We simply do not do enough for installers. Our reporting is more focused on product selection and business issues and we can definitely do better helping installers do their jobs and managers train their installers.

Thank You

Thank you again!

Ideas on how to improve or what you want to see on IPVM, please share in the comments or email us at info@ipvm.com