Milestone Declares End-To-End Is A Dead-End

I find it funny that he is lumping in ad-hoc and bolt-on as a negative when that is exactly what you're doing when using Milestone. You are building an ad-hoc bolt-on solution for your client. That's the whole point of the APIs and SDKs is so that various equipment/software can just bolt-on to Milestone.

Milestone should private label Dahua to start selling their own line of cameras.

All in all, I do agree with Tim on most of these points as well as the Open Platform concept. That doesn't mean that end to end is irrelevant, though. There are pros and cons to each. For myself, though, I've weighed the these and keep coming back to an open platform preference for my clients.

Thoughts?

I don't see how a closed platform could keep up with the rapid technological advancement of the free market....

It normally lags. Think Mac hardware vs PC Hardware.

What would Tim call HIKvision? Open, End to End or Hybrid?

Their cameras are Milestone compatible and their NVR's will record other brands of cameras. Who is he defining as his "closed" competition?

There are VMS platforms which offer both, end-to-end solutions and are open platforms as well, they are not mutually exclusive. A point seemingly lost on Milestone.

I would suggest that End-To-end in fact is a dead end. The premises PBX manufacturers were a classic example of this - they produced closed systems with proprietary telephone endpoints, and this made it difficult if not impossible for the manufacturer ( and by extension its integrator partners) to react and adjust to changes in market demand and new disruptive technologies. And now most of them have gone the way of the dinosaur, replaced by cloud-based or open source VoIP offerings in which a wide array of endpoint manufacturers can be connected to meet customers' demands.

The worst position an integrator can put himself in is to be heavily invested as a partner of an "end-to-end" closed solution, and have to tell his customer that he cant provide the solution to his security problem or request because ( Pelco/Avigilon/etc) wont fully support the necessary tech or camera endpoints until ( maybe) "the next release"...

That is true, but I have observed that End to End solutions tend to naturally prioritize their R&D toward their own endpoints and firmware which often results in limited functionality and integration of competitor endpoints.

We recently experienced this with Pelco Digital Sentry, which we were forced to phase out at several locations because it couldn't keep up with panoramic camera tech; Pelco's own 360 offering was delayed numerous times, and they chose not to update the software to support Axis or any other high-end manufacturer's panoramic at that time, and we were left high and dry and could not meet customers' requests for these cameras. Not a good position to be in. 

The market is stratified so the question is which market benefits from the proposed solution.  Residential and SMB are probably not Milestones market anymore (if they ever were) so corporate/industrial is the way to go and they are hard to fault at that scale.  Axis will be remembered in the future like many of the former consumer electronic greats from yesteryear - niche market high-end or badge only cheap crap.

That's my take - I could be wrong.