Roundtable: Inspired Video Innovation
Experts from eight of the industry’s foremost video surveillance technology suppliers summarize and prioritize the latest solutions. They break down the key ingredients to ensure engineering breakthroughs meet real-world needs to become breakout successes.
Photo: ©istockphoto.com
Video surveillance has practically become synonymous with innovation as far as electronic security is concerned. Indeed, since the turn of the century technologies associated with video have revolutionized the industry. That transformation continues unabated as omnipresent threats and the quest to heighten organizational efficiencies have created a seemingly insatiable demand.
While the advances and opportunities they bring are exciting news for security integrators, there is the ongoing challenge of keeping up with the latest developments to determine what makes the most sense from business, sales and technical standpoints. Unfortunately, like many buzzwords, “innovation” is overused and often misapplied. To get a firmer grip on what truly qualifies as innovative in today’s dynamic video surveillance marketplace, SECURITY SALES & INTEGRATION interviewed subject matter experts from eight of the industry’s leading suppliers.
Presented in reverse alphabetical order by company name, the executives and product managers respond to queries in 10 vital areas. They are: innovation’s true meaning; being an innovator vs. adopting others’ ideas; marketing new concepts; contending with commoditization; designing solutions based on user input; latest video advances; hottest vertical markets; innovations that have yet to catch on; technologies that may migrate into surveillance; and integrator success tips.
What Innovation Means to Me
Frank De Fina, Senior Vice President of Sales & Marketing, Samsung Techwin America: The ability to fill a need with a relevant solution that previously didn’t exist defines true innovation. This applies not just to the development of new technologies, but also their implementation and availability for mainstream applications. A good example at Samsung is our continued efforts to deliver leading-edge technologies with added value at competitive price points. This strategy has enabled us to cultivate distribution channels that make it easy for installers and users to acquire and implement cutting-edge video surveillance solutions that would otherwise not be affordable. We believe this has helped to accelerate the deployment of more advanced video surveillance and security solutions particularly on networked platforms.
Dave Poulin, Director of Vertical Markets for Physical Security and Mobile Video, Panasonic System Communications Co. of North America: Innovation is really about anticipating market and customer needs, and building products that best meet those needs. For us, this means working closely with our customers to understand their primary security concerns and coming up with strategies to solve them. Our engineering expertise and longevity in this market allows us to develop breakthrough technologies that result in complete, end-to-end security solutions that protect people and assets, optimize network resources, and deliver the business intelligence necessary to improve the efficiency and profitability of our customers’ businesses.
Illy Gruber, Product Marketing Manager for Security, NICE Systems: I see it as providing tools or solutions that address challenges or needs the user may not have even been able to express. Once they get these new tools, it significantly changes the way they do things. I would also describe innovation as the ability to creatively solve known challenges or needs in ways that reduce complexity and cost. Video analytics is a good example. Users know they can’t effectively scan and process the masses of video footage that stream into the control room. But they can rely on video analytics to identify issues worthy of attention. This allows control room operators to manage events as opposed to just trying to identify them.
Innovate or Follow Leaders?
Kostas Mellos, Commercial Leader, Video & Transmission, Interlogix: Innovation and the ability to adapt existing products for critical market needs are both important. You can design and build a unique product or find a different way of using existing products to solve problems. Either way, technology and innovation work together to provide more safe and secure environments.
Pierre Racz, President and CEO, Genetec: Innovation and imitation are two valid strategies to achieve commercial success. Imitation is not in our DNA. All of our founding members and engineers, and most of our current engineers at Genetec are avid consumers of sci-fi and are more inclined to think about what could be, instead of what is. For innovative companies, especially when they are young, commercial success is secondary to technology. We derive satisfaction less from commercial success than we do from bringing to life really cool ideas. The luck part of the story is that we turned out to have some latent business acumen that ended up serving us well. We now pride ourselves in both being creative in business and in technology.
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About the Author
Scott Goldfine
Scott Goldfine is the marketing director for Elite Interactive Solutions. He is the former editor-in-chief and associate publisher of Security Sales & Integration. He can be reached at [email protected].
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