Latest Technology News Today – Get Latest Information Technology Updates and Services Latest Technology News Today – Get Latest Information Technology Updates and Services 
Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications, India and SAARC explains the new producrs and focus areas and the changing business dynamics post pandemic
While Axis has been expanding its presence pan India, in recent times we have seen major initiatives in the east. What are the details about these eastern ventures?
We expanded into the eastern part of the market where we did not have any resource person up until 6 months back. We saw the opportunity and interest there. We have also been doing a lot of events there with the channel partners and the distributors in the past. We realized we must put our own resources over there to get the local touch and feel, and be closer to our partners, customers, and consultants. So, we appointed our key account manager there to get more local presence.
As part of these policies, we also announced three big wins there – The Calcutta Police, where we have deployed close to 800 cameras for traffic monitoring, monitoring all the junctions. That was a big win. Secondly, KIMS Hospital, Bhubaneswar, which is one of our largest installations for a 2000-bed hospital from a surveillance point of view. They are using it mainly for monitoring the visitors, facility, and the perimeter as well. They have benefited a lot in terms of technology and streamlining the processes and a reduction of the cost in terms of lot of employees not required for the mundane stuff on the perimeter and other things.
The third deployment is at the Salt Lake Stadium or the Vivekananda Yuvabharati Krirangan, the second largest stadium in the country, which hosted the Junior FIFA World Cup. The installation there had to be of international standard in terms of the quality of the video and being able to recognize the crowd from the installations to manage all the miscreants who create trouble when the match is happening. We had to manage the entire needs of the customer when it comes to difficult light conditioning and glaring lights when the match is played during the night scenario. Hence, the camera must give good quality footages and evidence quality footages despite the different light conditions. We have got good connections going there with our partners and the ecosystem.
Axis has been one of the premier names in surveillance with a spate of products. What are the new enhancement areas that you have focused in the Indian market?
At Axis, we have been pioneers in IP cameras and network video technology. We are also adding a lot of other elements into the solutions. We just came out with the audio solutions which can help to add audio to a video solution. What happens in a video solution is that you see the footages. However, when you have to make announcements, you have to go to another analog system which is not integrated with the video system. So it becomes very manual. Axis announced the whole flute of network audio solutions which help automate announcements as and when the incidents happen, or it can be an announcement made by an operator. It can flag off on an incident to somebody and that person can see what is happening at an incident or in case of a human intruder or others. It can go on the network audio and make the announcement for the person to move away or make alternative announcement.
We are also seeing an opportunity for the public address which is mainly analog driven audio market. We are seeing a lot of interest in terms of moving to IP from the movement of analog camera to IP camera which is happening at a rapid pace. We are seeing a trend where the audio as a technology also will move to network or IP because of all the benefits that it gives as you can create your own zones, you can make announcements to specific speakers you want , you can get feedback on the audio which will be easy for the operator to know when the announcement was made. These are some of the benefits that we bring in.
How would you ensure migration from the existing surveillance solutions to these audio based and IP based solutions?
We cannot simply ask the customers to rip open everything and go the network audio way. A lot of installations are there with the current speaker systems and people who deployed the amplifiers and the equalizers would not like to throw away the same if they recently invested in the installation. What we have done is to migrate in a step by step fashion like what happened in the network video industry, lot of people had good analog cameras and they had lot of cabling and they did not want to simply throw away everything and move to IP, so we came up with a technology called the video encoder technology. The video encoder technology helped an analog camera on one side to connect to the encoder and on the other side it came on IP. So, it gave all the benefits of IP on one side without changing the investments of the existing analog camera and the cabling that is already done.
In a very similar fashion, we will come out with the network audio bridge and the network amplifiers as well which can help connect to the analog speaker on one side and brings out IP on the other side. While, we will not be able to enhance the quality of the speaker because the speaker is under the analog, the management becomes quite simple because everything is coming on IP and you can run a software to manage it. It is easy from a central console to manage all the speakers where the announcements are happening. You can also retain your existing installation in terms of the cabling and the speakers which are already there.
What about the greenfield installations?
We are witnessing a lot of interest for our network amplifiers and the network audio bridge which is like an encoder in the video industry. But from green field opportunities, we are experiencing a lot of interest for new speakers. We have two types of speakers. One is the horn speakers- if you go to the streets or the pandals, you will generally see a horn kind of a speaker there which is analog. We have a similar thing in IP which is more for outdoor installations and outdoor announcements for large malls where you can install it at a height.
The other one is more like a ceiling speaker which is mainly used for public address and can be used for background music as well. These are the applications that we are really targeting by adding audio onto video and by adding audio as a replacement for people who want to migrate from an analog audio to network based audio system.
The other important technology is the network radar. Radar is a technology that existed even during the World War times. But how the network radar helps is that it integrates with our video because not everywhere you have full lighting. The radar can actually sense the movement and once the movement is sensed, you can actually make a panoramic camera point towards where the movement is happening. You see if the movement is because of an intruder and then you can add the speaker to make the announcement or you see it is just a vehicle parked or just an animal passing by, then there is no action required. This is perfect in areas where you have the challenge of lighting or where you cannot get and you do not want to install too many cameras. You can use the radar system for up to 120 degree and 60 feet and then track if there is any movement over there. If movement is there, then only PTZ cameras are required as it can automatically trigger the cameras to look at the direction where there is a movement. You can automate an announcement and take an action. We are adding more newer technologies to video which can complete the solution.
Does this radar thing work in case of existing camera installations from a competing vendor? What are your particular differentiators from competitors?
Integration happens at the software level. When the radar triggers, it is in an open platform in the network video system, so it can work in any of the video management software where our network radar is compatible. Once it triggers due to movement, it can work on any other camera system that is installed on the VMS which is based in the installation.
Radar is the next thing which we are seeing. One of the main announcements we made recently is our cameras are made from the ARTPEC chip set at the core of the Axis cameras. The second generation of our chip set allows to view high quality images because Axis is always known for good image quality. We go beyond to provide fantastic light finder technology. With absolute darkness, we can still give you good quality colour footages and images which is evidence grade. We just enhanced our light quality light-finder technology with imaging technology.
The second thing we provide is the superior compression technique as one of the big challenges with video surveillance is the vast storage taken for storing the videos and the bandwidth required for transmitting the videos. For installations which runs into hundreds and thousands of cameras specially city surveillance, the biggest cost is the storage and transmission. Thus, we save a lot because we go beyond our current implementation to save an additional 20-30% of our storage space giving huge savings for our customers in terms of the range and the bandwidth.
Also, the new chip set is capable of AI and ML and superior cyber security implementation. For instance, if somebody has tampered your camera, it will automatically prompt somebody and will go into a state of ceasing to operate. It must be securely booted by somebody and only then it comes back to its normal state. People cannot tamper the camera. You may have been following a lot of articles where cyberattacks are happening during the normal times and even the COVID times. Our cameras are extremely cyber secure and goes into the secure boot and if the software is tampered by somebody it will alert the authorities and will refuse to boot. These are very advanced security features which we bring into our cameras further adding to the safety and cyber policy of the organization.
How are you managing your internal employees and customers during these COVID19 pandemic times?
In the current COVID times while we have been working from home, we are encouraging our employees to stay connected through Webex, VPNs and Microsoft Teams to connect among ourselves and distributors, partners, and customers. We have used the time to collaborate and do a lot of internal workshops for learning and brainstorming sessions. We have also used these platforms to educate our partners. We have run close to 45- 50 webinars in the last three months and covered more than 5000-6000 participants in our entire ecosystem across our technology, our products, our ports, audio, explosion protected cameras, etc. We have used various platforms to connect and have got valuable feedback and appreciation from them. The main thing that we brought as a business continuity was to be available and responsive to our entire ecosystem, which is basically our distributors, partners, consultants and our end customers. Our organization has been extremely responsive to everybody during such difficult times.
In the changing business model, what are the applications or use cases that are emerging in the surveillance domain?
One of the main applications we are seeing is how Axis can help in a return to office kind of a scenario. We are witnessing requirements like how to monitor body temperature for a large screening because we are not a medical equipment company and we cannot detect if somebody has fever. However, we can use our thermal technology and our application partner software. If you can load on our cameras then it can basically tell that this person’s temperature is a little high, and then he can be pulled aside and can go in for further screening or testing. This is one type of a solution and there is a lot of interest in the market. While we don’t own the software because ours is an open platform and people can drive applications on our camera.
On thermal cameras, there are 4 or 5 companies who run software to basically detect the body temperature and inform somebody especially in all the entrances, which could be offices, airports, train stations, schools, etc. This opens up a big opportunity of our thermal camera and what problems the customers want to solve. It may not be a solution forever but for the next 6-12 months, people would still like to check if anybody has a fever or should that person be allowed or should the person be asked to go back.
The second solution we are seeing is people are maintaining the social distance. While in office, the sitting arrangement can be done in such a way that people sit apart but especially during lunch time or when people come into office and start leaving the offices or take their coffee breaks they tend to crowd together? How to ensure that the crowding is not happening? That’s a solution again through our application partners. They use our cameras to automate to check if somebody is too close or when social distance norms are not maintained. It can basically alert somebody or integrate with our audio technology to inform people to maintain social distance.
The third solution is mask detection. This will be most beneficial in offices and institutions. It is not possible for somebody to physically monitor all the time because the attention span will not be there and sometimes it can be violated as well. Hence, we are seeing applications where the camera has to check this and if somebody is not wearing a mask, it can be used to alert the person
How about application use cases emerging in airports?
In the past, we have seen applications where airports wanted to go touchless. We have had applications with our ecosystem partners like facial recognition which tags your boarding card with your face and then there is no need to show your boarding card. In Indian airports, we have to show our boarding pass and it can be time consuming or there can be human error. To avoid all that and to improve efficiency of the airport, one solution that is very commonly used is how to automate the first time when somebody is entering the airport, that is, to tag the face with the boarding card and then it sees your face and allows you because no need to show your boarding card everywhere you are going and then you can simply go all the way to your gate without being monitored or without the boarding card being checked 4- 5 times in all the places. That is one application that we had done through NEC. That is something we will see because most airports are trying to go contactless and avoid as much touch as possible. This is because a lot of people are travelling and they would like to maintain the hygiene and ensure that the spread of such viruses is absolutely minimized.
What about the Axis applications for healthcare especially the touchless solutions?
For healthcare, Axis can really offer an end to end kind of a solution and we can do a lot of touchless entry as well. In end to end solutions I have already mentioned about audio and the radar. We can also integrate something called the door station. Additionally, our Axis control solution will be integrated in our software. What will happen is in our single platform, we will be able to control the whole thing. We will be able to control the video, the Axis control, the door stations, the network radar into a single platform including sensors that basically connect the door or a device.
One example I can give is integrate Axis control. What happens is the moment, at the door where you install the camera and it recognizes you and hence there is no need to take out your phone or a card or punch in a number on the door controller. The moment your face is there in the database, the camera looks into it and tells the controller to open the door because he is our employee and we need to allow him in. Then it can keep all the statistics of when the employee arrived into office and when did he exits for attendance purposes. Also, it looks into things like whether employees or staff at the hospital are maintaining hygiene, that is, wearing PPE equipment or going into restricted areas. All those things can be monitored with a single platform.
We have a lot of analytics vendor as well, education development partners through whom we can engage our system integrators to provide a total solution to mainly hospitality, education and the healthcare industry. This is how we intend to go to market for a touch free environment. If you look at our Axis control solution, it can be made totally touch -free. Those are the type of solutions which we see off late as an increasing interest from the healthcare sector.
Moving forward, maybe for the next one year or so, verticals like retail, hospitality definitely and even education to an extent, themselves, will sort of see a slump. How would this impact the overall Axis business?
I think overall, it will be a mixed bag. Some industries are growing, some industries are, in a way, flat or de-growing. Hospitality and tourism are some of the industries which will definitely be impacted and as we move forward we will see a slump in those industries. But anything related to content, for instance, are growing. All the content companies, the telecom companies are in a very strong position now because of the offtake of the bandwidth and people are using more online content as compared to printed content. We will see more investment from those industries, specially datacenters, content providers and service providers businesses will increase. For us, what is getting lowered in some of the segments, where we historically did well will get compensated by industries like these. We still see that investments are going on. With respect to commercial sector, some are investing, some are staying very cautious with regards to buildings and things like that. From the pharmaceutical industry, there is positive news for us.
Commercial as an industry will be a mixed bag. We see some who are investing, who are providing IT services, their businesses will boom but some focus on segments like hospitality and dependent on international markets and some of the segments, they are going to sort of de-grow. However, for us, what has been very positive is that one of the biggest segments is the smart city, the traffic projects, and the safe city segments. Those investments irrespective of what has happened in these extraordinary times, would have been already executed and the governmentt has not pulled off the funds or they are not withdrawing the funds. They are still going forward with those investments. You can see bids happening even during the lockdown time as well. A lot of states went ahead with the Smart City bids online because people could not come physically to submit the bids. Hence, we saw that those kinds of bids, especially government bids and some for the city surveillance and smart city bids went ahead. That for us, has been the biggest jump.
Content has been the biggest jump. In Critical infrastructure we have seen a 50-50 scenario, commercial sector has also been 50-50. In retail, there has been a little slowdown, but they are looking into new mechanisms of providing these solutions like social distancing, of people counting, etc. They are trying to implement and lure in more customers or having the shopping experience in a safe way. However, I have been some of the reports that retail is probably going to spring back because what is going to happen is so much of suppression with people not shopping and people not going out, the moment things ease down in a few months, there is going to be a big surge in terms of people going out and they want to buy and stuff. Then it will be more the experience than the need.
A lot of Chinese companies have significant market shares in India in surveillance. However, with a different perception towards Chinese products and services is developing, so will that help Axis to some extent?
From my experience and this is my 9th year in Axis, what I have seen is a lot of projects that Axis lost in some of the segments because organizations went ahead with low-cost brands. For some reason, we lost the project due to price or budget constraint of the customer. One trend I am seeing is people wanting to come back to premium solutions because of whatever experience they have gone through. They think of low cost but then they get into issues like total cost of ownership, installation, and product upfront cost, right. But after installing the product and maintaining the product, your failures, your downtimes, your operational costs, your maintenance costs, your staff cost to maintain it, cleaning costs – these costs are not taking into account. What companies go through is save less to start with during the entire life cycle of the product and after 5 years when they really look into it, they sort of end up paying as much as they would have paid to Axis or probably even more. Thus, our messaging is, do not just look at the upfront cost and do not just look at installation cost. Look at the entire cost – the openness of the system, the cybersecurity, the implementation cost, the training cost, use of installation, everything has a cost. When you look at a 5-year horizon, Axis tends to be competitive right so that is our messaging for the enterprises.
When we spoke 5 years back, many did not believe it, they thought it was a fake story. Now we can give example of how much bandwidth can be saved because Axis has got a technology called the Zipstream, which can bring down the storage costs by 30-50%. Thus, if you go for a low-cost solution, storage cost is also there. You are paying low for camera, but your storage cost is very high. If your storage is high, then you are consuming so much power and space. Over a period of 5 years, we are able to reduce the storage costs due to the number of servers required to run the VMS to run our cameras as they very powerful, indicating that we need less number of servers to run the software as compared to the low cost brands. We bring down the number of servers and there is a power saving cost.
Axis cameras are one of the greenest in the industry, which means, with all our competing cameras, we would take almost 50% less power to run the camera. Normally cameras are installed 24*7, which means, on a 1000 camera installation over 5 years, the electricity bill saving itself could be about 40-50 lakhs. We are able to bring as a benefit now to the end customer and they started realizing that if they pay a little extra in the beginning, it’s an absolute peace of mind for the cycle of installation and the cost is not so expensive even while looking at the initial cost. This story seems to be working and we are seeing people having gone through the experience of low-cost brands and are coming back to us. Some are coming back to us because of the cyber security implementation is strong, and open. Our policy of cyber security is like any other global company. We are very open about what we claim. There are no backdoors in our cameras, and production that are sold in India are coming from origin in Europe or Asia or South America. All this gives us an advantage, in a way, with companies who would not like to risk going for low cost brands.
How about your support and services with most of these critical installations in a largely WFH environment?
For us, support is of two types. One can be related to some issue with a camera or setting or some integration with the VMS, or some software related issue. The other type of support is failure of the cameras and something must be done. What we did initially when our employees were in remote, was be able to attend to all the software related problems. We maintained the continuity to all our software related issues. There were no disruptions in that but for the hardware failure what happened was for 2 months, the entire thing was a lockdown. As and when people raised issues, we said due to the lockdown we are not able to access your cameras in our Bangalore facility. However, we created a pool of queue systems of noting down those cases in that order and assured that we will change it on priority the moment the lockdown eases out and our employees are allowed to come back to the office. Hence, three weeks back what we did was we allowed our employees in Bangalore as it is not much affected as Mumbai or Delhi or Chennai, we allowed our hardware repair staff to go back to office with all the precautions and all the social distancing norms are maintained. We took all these on priority and then we communicated with them to send in their cameras to fix them.
What about the installations which were not in Bangalore as that would involve your support partners and the distributors also?
In those cases, if you look into our model, it is a two-tier model. We don’t sell anything directly to our end customers, it is always done through a channel partner. In some cases involving a hardware failure, since a partner was not available or they are also under lockdown, the customer themselves have dismantled the cameras themselves and then sent it back to us which we acknowledged and support because if the customers want to do that we don’t stop that. But in many places, our partners were also back and working at the customer location, had onsite engineers. They were able to dismantle those cameras and send it back to us and in some places we even made an exception where there involved crucial installations and people cannot go twice, so, somebody has to go for removing the camera once, there is a huge set of procedures and again going back to reinstall it involves another huge set of procedure. But we made exceptions during this extraordinary time.
The large cities where most of the installations are likely to come are also the hotspots. Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Ahmedabad, these are the biggest hotspots. So naturally it means that things are not working normally, so were you able to clear the backlog in these three weeks?
We experienced a peak in terms of the load. These people were at home and they couldn’t do anything, but they were also mentally prepared to work for an extra couple of hours every day to clear the backlog. For some, we took a decision to do a replacement instead of waiting for repairing it and sending it back, we took a decision to make replacement. For some we made a decision to advance ship and trust with the customer and partner and then we asked them to ship the product back. Instead of taking the full load and struggling, we took those measures so that the load was manageable by our staff. The first two weeks were really tight but from last week, it has come under control. I am quite happy with what the staff has really done in terms of keeping our customers happy and we are very happy that we are getting very kind words from our partners and customers because many are not even available to take the calls or even respond.Our team did a good job in supporting our partners and the customers. I cannot say that it’snot yet back to normal because suddenly you see a big shipment from somewhere and the load really picks up, but we are taking these measures with some exception. Our end motto is to keep our customers happy. Hence, sometimes, we are not that process driven. Thus, we are okay to make an exception in terms of support we took a decision to make an advanced shipment, etc. Those kind of calls we take, and we keep our partners and customers happy.
Some of the critical installations are also essential services which were basically on during the whole time. So surveillance systems under those locations, do they also fall under essential services?
It is about the message we provide to all the partners. We call it as a crucial installation where you cannot afford any down time or wait for any moment to come and wait for the entire week for the whole process to turn around. For those installations, we request onsite spare installations that we keep. The operations are not disrupted, and in some cases the partners really keep it so that replacement time can be reduced. In some cases the customers cannot leave it even for a one-day down time. Those cameras we give depending on the number of camera installations, the recommended number we expect them to keep on site. We provide them with the spares and the DOQs, and they send the cameras for inspection and then they use the spare camera for the time being so, that there is no downtime. We have had some incidents in the past and we also learned with experience. Hence, when we investigate the project, we analyze if it is crucial project or critical infrastructure or defense related. If it is, then advise them to add the additional cameras over there which can be kept as spare on site so that the whole system is not under pressure. That is how we maintain our stance on crucial installation. There are no major escalations related to crucial installations which means either it has not failed or if it has failed, then there is a local spare which has been used up.
Another area is where some of these cheaper products gained market share was especially among these SMEs. So typically, do you have any special GTM for these mid-market or SME companies and now in the light of COVID, they are even more challenged. Do you have any specific GTM for them?
For our market, we categorize in terms of the number of camera sale up to 100 cameras. Up to 10 smalls under small and up to 100 falls under medium. For this kind of solution, for the 100-camera installation where I mentioned about few audio systems, Axis control, radar, all integrated in one, we can do end to end. We made it very simple because in the past, we realized that our channel partners had to literally struggle for the small and medium installations to go to multiple partners.
Cameras are one part of the solution and then we have storage and software and analytics, we have Axis control. They had to literally go to 20 companies to pitch the solution and the entire process was painful, support was painful and even for a customer, too many devices to manage. We simplified the solution into Axis end to end. It’s a piece of mind and in case of a single vendor, we can do the whole thing. We made the installations very simple. For instance, MS is one of the simplest to install and use and this is based on the feedback we get from many of our partners and end customers. That Is one part of the thing.
We have a huge channel push where if you are already selling storage or server or applications, selling this is no rocket science. Just be an Axis channel partner and its delta business for both the parties and for the customers it’s one of the best end to end solutions that you can get in the market. We have very strong channel push throughout our distribution and we also put in lot of marketing efforts in terms of signed up new partners, especially in IT, networking storage area where they think video surveillance is complex but the positioning we make is it is very simple and it can give 10-20% extra business at your bottom line and the topline. That excites them and once they start using our system, they find it easy, more repeat buying. Thus, that’s how we target the SMEs. This was from a channel point of view.From an end customer point of view, it will be manufacturing, retail, healthcare – these are some of the biggest buyers of our end to end solutions because most of the installations are around 100 cameras.
