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d e t e k t o r i n t e r n a t i o n a l · 1 7
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business
development
Niche products in the spotlight
"Our export business might
increase to 95 percent in five years.
The customers we have in Taiwan
are already moving their factories
to China. We sell 15 percent of
our chips to Taiwan, and all of that
could move to China. In Korea,
companies are trying to run as fast
as they can to stay away from the
commoditisation that is happen-
ing in China. So I guess more and
more of the standard definition
products that we sell will definitely
move to China."
Coordinating with partners
John Monti believes Pixim's big-
gest challenge is coordinating with
partners, ensuring that they are
well informed to sell the Pixim
technology most effectively.
"We have about 30 ODMs
which are hardware manufac-
turers that build cameras using
Pixim chips, so we actually don't
need to solicit any more of their
competitors because there are
already plenty of places to source
Pixim-powered cameras. We have
an excellent infrastructure of high
quality camera developers offering
a wide breath of products.
The company is not very
interested in targeting brands like
Axis or Panasonic, instead they go
directly to specifiers, integrators and
end users with their channel devel-
opment programme to promote
the benefits (i.e., natural color in a
wide range of lighting conditions)
of having a Pixim imager.
Trends
Pixim stresses that combining
image processors and image sen-
sors is a huge trend. Another
popular trend is that today,
there is much more emphasis
placed on image quality than
before.
John Monti says: "If you
look at the divisions within the
physical security market, I think
video is the strongest growth
market. You can get a lot of
information from video; you
can count cars, identify faces
and license plates, learn from
the behaviour of retail shoppers,
etc. Look how images have
revolutionised the phone. I re-
ally think we are only just at the
beginning of how imaging will
affect the security market. The
growth will continue to many
decades."
gives a 90 percent power save
versus RAID.
display products
next on the agenda
Veracity has not yet launched
a display product, but they are
working on it.
"If you have megapixel
streams coming in to your system
and you want to display them
on a video wall, you need a lot
of PCs and monitors. Because
of the amount of decoding and
data manipulation requirement,
it takes a lot of processing power.
This is a management nightmare
and it just has to become better.
We have ideas of how to develop
that, but it is a future thing for
us," Alastair McLeod says.
The US is Veracity's biggest
market and last year the company
grew 54 percent there.
Alastair McLeod says: "Cold-
store is our flagship product, but
yet not our biggest in terms of
dollar sales, because it is relatively
new. However, it will be, very
quickly. Our main business is the
transmission products."
Continuing to install coax
He stresses that transmission
products go with IP cameras and
welcomes the tipping point when
Veracity's aim is to support the
evolution and deployment of
megapixel video surveillance and
to design products which solve
real-world IP video problems. The
company has 29 employees and is
based in Glen Rock, New Jersey,
and Prestwick, Scotland.
Alastair McLeod, CEO of
Veracity says: "We started the
company seven years ago when the
whole market was moving towards
IP. The reason for moving to IP
video was to achieve high resolu-
tion. Therefore, the obvious thing
to develop would be megapixel
cameras and megapixel network
recorders. I saw that there would
be constraints in changing over to
megapixel and those constraints
were transmission, storage and
display."
Starting with transmission
Veracity began to develop trans-
mission products and until two
years ago, they made up for a
hundred percent of the company's
revenue. Some of the transmission
products are Ethernet over coax
technology which enables users
to replace analogue video surveil-
lance with digital IP cameras and
hardware which transforms co-
axial cable into a full-bandwidth
LAN connection.
Today, the company also sells
Coldstore, a digital surveillance
storage system.
Alastair McLeod says: "More
and more external storage is
being used, and there are almost
only RAID systems on the
market. RAID was developed in
1976 when disks were tiny. The
disks are hot, they make each
other vibrate, you use them 24/7
and the power consumption is
high. This causes disks to fail and
with Coldstore we solved these
problems."
Coldstore is a Network At-
tached Storage system (NAS)
designed specifically for video
surveillance systems which need
very high capacity for megapixel
IP cameras and/or long archive
periods. With a sequential filing
system, Coldstore uses hard
disks like video tapes and it
VeracitypredictedtheIPvideoexplosion
Veracity was established in 2005 when Alastair McLeod
realised there were a few constraints for megapixel video to
breakthrough. Since then, Veracity has been developing trans-
mission, storage and display products, primarily for network
video applications.
world network video surveil-
lance equipment sales will over-
take analogue video surveillance
equipment sales.
"The more IP cameras, the
more transmission. People are
still installing analogue cameras
over coax, and of course we see
this simply as future business for
us, as sooner or later everyone
will convert to IP cameras,
re-using the existing coax with
Ethernet adaptors," he says.
John Monti, Vice President of worldwide
sales and marketing, and a co-founding
executive of Pixim.
Alastair McLeod, CEO of Veracity.