Siemens OEMs Milestone
By John Honovich, Published Jan 21, 2015, 12:00am ESTMilestone has picked up one of the biggest companies in the world as an OEM.
In this note, we examine how Siemens is using Milestone's VMS, how this compares to other Milestone OEMs, what this means for the two companies and how it impacts integrators.
Siemens OEM as 'Siveillance VMS'
This partnership [link no longer available] is a straight OEM / re-brand without any changes in Milestone's technology. Siemens is calling it the 'Siveillance VMS [link no longer available]'.
The press photo shows XProtect with a different color set as shown below:
Siemens Siveillance VMS is a new product line for Siemens, replacing other recording software they previously used.
It fits within their overall 'Siveillance' security software solutions which includes analytics and PSIM software [link no longer available], evolved / from their 2006 Vistascape acquisition. However, the VMS portion can be used on its own without those parts.
OEMing From Milestone
Milestone primarily sells through its own brand, however it does have an ongoing OEM program including an OEM sales director [link no longer available].
The most famous Milestone OEM is OnSSI, though OnSSI oeming of Milestone is different than Siemens, in that OnSSI has developed a significant portion of its own technology most notably on the client and administrative side.
Why Siemens OEMed Milestone
Siemens described to us the benefits of having "one point of reference" and "everything under one brand".
Siemens was open about it being a re-brand, including in their official announcement [link no longer available], though given Milestone's brand / product recognition it would be hard to hide it from industry people. On the other hand, Siemen's Siveillance VMS product page [link no longer available] does obscure the Milestone relationship.
The Impact on the Industry
Siemens Building Technologies is a major player in both Europe and North America, reporting $6.6 billion USD annual revenue. Most importantly, Siemens is a sizeable integrator focusing on large-scale security projects.
As Siemens acknowledged, now that they are OEMing Milestone, that is what Siemens the integrator will be selling. That's bad for Milestone dealers competing with Siemens and for rival VMS vendors.
We expect this to have the biggest impact on straight VMS projects where Milestone is just being resold as Siemens as that where is most of the market demand, compared to the existing Siemens analytics / PSIM which remains a niche.
