The IP video surveillance opportunity | Part Four: Hurdles

The evolution of video surveillance systems to IP technology is creating opportunities for managed service providers to penetrate the space – especially by tying these services to customers’ business processes, making them more than just security offerings. (The first three parts of this series identified opportunities among enterprise, small and medium business and government customers.)

But perhaps the biggest impediment to the growth of this market is the lack of interoperability among the equipment involved – a problem stakeholders are working to remedy.

“It’s a very serious problem,” said Stan Schatt, vice president at ABI Research.

Today the market for video surveillance gear is divided between proprietary analog equipment and newer IP gear. And the various elements of the newer IP systems – from the system management platforms to the recorders and storage devices to the cameras themselves -- are not well integrated or easily interoperable, forcing users into single-supplier relationships without best-of-breed products.

“Depending how well you integrate [the systems] into those cameras, it can get pretty cumbersome in a monitoring center if, for one set of cameras, you’ve got to pull up their [graphical user interface (GUI)] and for another set, you’ve got to pull up [another] GUI,” said Gillis Cashman, partner at MC Venture Partners, a venture capital firm following the IP surveillance space.

“Standardization is going to [allow companies to] effectively tie all these systems over a single interface and not have to pull out the information individually.”

That’s important not just for ease of use, he said. One of the biggest hurdles in selling these systems today is the upfront installation costs -- often tens of thousands of dollars each, Cashman said. Standardization, along with further deployment, will allow the market to mix and match the best gear, prompting competition that will bring prices down. And system integration will allow for greater automation of services, he said, as systems can be programmed to routinely follow policy orders without the need for more manual intervention.