Meet the stars of CCTV

CRN brought together a group of experts in the surveillance and security market to discuss the key issues surrounding IP surveillance and chart the directions this fast-growing market could take. Simon Meredith reports on what they had to say

According to analyst IMS Research, the IP surveillance (IPS) market is growing very quickly. The market for video servers (codecs) in EMEA was worth $60m in 2005. As the move to IP gains momentum, this is predicted to grow to $247.8m by 2009. And this is just the factory gate for the encoders and decoders that enable an analogue camera to work on a digital network. Of course, this is no indication of the size of the ‘pure’ IP surveillance network. IMS Research monitors the market for cameras separately. It was worth $80.1m in 2005 and is predicted to grow to $360.6m by 2009, according to IMS.

The growth rates for IP hardware alone are about 45 per cent per year. Then there is software, storage, installation and integration, maintenance and service to wrap around the products. So even if hardware prices and margins fall – as they inevitably must when the market grows – there should be plenty of value-add potential in the IPS market.

At the moment, hardware acc-ounts for between 10 and 50 per cent of a total solution sale, according to Dominic Bruning, EMEA marketing director at IP camera vendor Axis Communications.

“It depends on the size,” he says. “Typically, the larger the system, the lower the sales proportion is on network cameras. The rest goes on other hardware, services, cabling, maintenance and other components.”

It is therefore not dissimilar to the traditional CCTV market, says Martin Parry, director of G1, which is an installer and integrator of both traditional CCTV and IP-based surveillance systems. This suggests that price erosion on IP cameras may not be too drastic as the market grows. They are already reasonably priced, with some IP cameras costing as little as £150.

Parry adds that there is a tremendous cost benefit for certain types of application, such as in-town surveillance systems that are designed to discourage anti-social behaviour. Both Parry and James Condron, sales and marketing manager at solution pro-vider and integrator CNL, cite examples of installations they were involved in that were made possible because IP solutions were affordable.

Simon Harris, research director at IMS Research, says the growth of IP has to be put into perspective: CCTV has not, and will not, go away. For example, in shopping centres where there is a need for constant live surveillance, the analogue system will continue to dominate. But in other areas, such as retail, where footfall counting systems can be interfaced into electronic point of sale and central systems, IP is the ideal vehicle.

As well as the potential for integration work, additional hardware, particularly storage, is required with IP-based systems. Parry says that 90 per cent of what G1 installs in shopping centres – a particular area of focus for the company – is still analogue. But images are always recorded digitally and G1 can install up to 40 terabytes of storage to allow video to be retained for a sufficient period. In addition, codecs are required to cope with the volume of the conversion. Dedication servers are also required. Often blades are deployed to save space and keep power and management costs down.

How much storage capacity a customer needs depends on what they want to do, says Terry Beale, director of channels at storage vendor EMC. Until recently, Beale worked in the vendor’s public-sector division. He says there has been a rising interest in IP surveillance.

“If it is just an event and a customer needs to keep the video for just a few days, it doesn’t require much storage,” he says. “But if they are looking at it for evidence, where they need to keep the information, it can be very significant. We have seen the use of storage change over the past two years in the public sector because of the dangers of terrorism and other security threats. But we have not seen the same level of change in the commercial sector.”

Schools, colleges and hospitals are also very interested in the more affordable IP-based solutions, according to Condron.

“They are paying massive insurance premiums because they are high-risk environments and have difficult perimeters to protect,” he says. “There are special remote response centres that operate under the government’s BS8418 standard. They offer monitoring services to public-sector sites, but the school or LEA (Local Education Authority) has to find the money for CCTV first, and IP makes it much more feasible.”

There has been a rising tide of interest in the business market as well, according to Bruning.

“We’re seeing strong growth in education,” he says. “Schools are very open locations and have a lot of issues. They also have the IP infrastructure in place, so it lends itself to IP surveillance. In retail we have also seen significant installations.”

There is also strong growth in finance and other vertical markets, says Tom Kneis, UK sales director of security solutions at Anixter. Just about any business that has an existing network can derive more value from it by running IP surveillance on the network.

“People are looking at that infrastructure to run other services,” he says. “Security fits across that in a very cost-effective way in all vertical sectors and businesses of all sizes.”

Currently, the average size of an IP surveillance installation is between 30 and 40 cameras. But small installations get bigger, according to Thomas Leistiko, European sales manager at camera management software vendor Milestone Systems. Organisations use CCTV in one location, then equip other areas, he said.

However, Bruning claims that he has seen a figure that suggested the average number of cameras installed was just nine, which means there are plenty of smaller sites and prospects for growth in the small-business market.

To makes sense of this dichotomy you need to look at the legacy market, according to Kneis. “It [the number of cameras installed] has always been specific to an application, or to a site,” he says. “Once you open these up to IP that changes. It might be that one site that has eight cameras, but there will be 400 locations.”

The market is moving beyond pure surveillance, says Leistiko, and towards more integrated solutions and data. Many applications focus on people-counting and monitoring behaviour, rather than deterring and detecting criminal activity.

Condron says that the advantages of IP-based solutions are two-fold. “One is the fact that you can increase the availability of visual intelligence and distribute images to the point of need, rather than being at a fixed point, which is unfortunately partly the restriction with analogue,” he says. “Second, integration is now more of a key issue than it has been. The need to be able to integrate multiple security systems through single applications means that applications are becoming more important.”

Robert Veenis, business development manager at wireless vendor Proxim, says awareness of the different possibilities is growing.

“IP gives you a lot of flexibility,” he says. “You dare not fix to one point because it can run over wireless. Also, with Power over Ethernet [PoE], it is now relatively easy and swift to deploy cameras. The cost of installing fixed cabling can be very high, especially in built-up areas.”

Bruning says: “It is something like four times as expensive to run on Coaxial Cable than it is on Cat5. Most of the infrastructure is in place and the devices themselves are coming down in price. PoE allows you to deliver voice, video, data, telemetry over one cable, which you cannot do with an analogue system. It lowers the cost of installation and a lot of this is being driven by the end-user.”

One of major factors in the drive towards all these applications running over IP is standards, Kneis claims.

“There are documented standards for structured cabling and for wireless, something the end-user can know, feel and touch,” he says. “If you know what your ‘through-out’ is and you have that highway, by using the TCP/IP standard, you can get all of these disparate applications talking to

each other. Structured cabling networks are no longer black magic.”

Surveillance is just one of these applications. It seems that demand is building up for this and other video-based applications as awareness of IP’s capabilities grows. However, there is still a need and an opportunity to take IP surveillance to the market, but it has to be done in the right way, Beale says.

“It is application change that is driving the market and that will dictate the growth,” he says. “If you sell to a customer with an existing need, the criterion and requirements that they are putting down are limited by what they know. So you have to get to what they are trying to do as a business and then work through to what you can actually do with the technology. This is where it all starts and it’s the application that counts.”

But there is going to be a tipping point, according to Beale, where we will see much more widespread adoption of IP surveillance and other IP video-based applications. “The openness of the technology will create that,” he claims.

Dominic Tee, business development leader for access control and IP surveillance security at CCTV and security products distributor ADI-Gardiner Security, says that surveillance, access control and even areas such as biometric recognition are now cutting across each other in the IP world, and momentum is building in all areas.

Whether it is access control, CCTV or intruder alarms, it is a case of always managing data, bringing it all back across a common highway and integrating it into some kind of logic, Kneis says.

“That’s where the applications change because you get multiple users,” he adds. “There will be customers that want to know who came into their building that day and someone else who wants to see what’s happening with health and safety. This is where IP has the advantage over analogue, because rather than looking at a bunch of images, I can now log on and see the information that is pertinent to me.”

Combinations of IP cameras, software for people-counting and other data collection can be extremely useful and improving all the time. The quality of images is also improving drastically. Also, modern mega-pixel cameras are now being used in mixed installations with conventional analogue cameras. There are further advantages with mega-pixel cameras, Bruning claims.

“They allow you to cover a wider area so the requirement for pan-tilt-zoom or dome cameras diminishes and you have no moving parts,” he says. “So there is no motor to break down, and this means lower maintenance costs.”

The availability of new digital technologies is starting to expose some of the limitations of analogue as well, Kneis says.

One of Proxim’s biggest projects this year in the UK involves a set of mobile IP cameras using wireless technology for video surveillance in an area where there is a high level of criminal and anti-social behaviour. This network has been installed to replace the initial analogue-based system with fixed camera points which, although effective at first, were soon identified by perpetrators who simply stopped committing acts in areas where the cameras could record them.

Proxim is also starting to expose digital video recorders as the weak link in many of the installed systems. Often these devices are connected to the network through a codec, but they are not always secure and, when installed by a supplier that is not IT-focused, are often prone to failure, says Parry.

“Our analogue CCTV engineers have had to become IT experts very quickly,” Parry says. “We’ve had to invest in training.”

Harris claims: “We are even starting to see some IP camera sales in the small office/home office and consumer sector although it takes up only a small part of the market at the moment.”

He does not expect the home market to take off until service providers come into the market: “For many home-users I think cost is still a barrier.”

Bruning claims that this is already happening with several ISPs developing and offering out-of-the box surveillance or home-control solutions.

“They want to develop the sticky stuff that drives them back to the customer,” he says. “It makes them harder to get rid of and it’s just the same as voice.”

It is certainly possible to see applications in the home environment, according to Harris. “We are starting to see the need for a verified response with intruder alarms,” he says. “A video camera in the home is going to cut down the number of false alarms, so integration with the intruder alarm is one way that we could get cameras into the home.”

A similar trend is detectable in the commercial market, says Condron.

“There are some significant applications being run around the distribution of video and/or alarm data to integrating multiple systems,” he says. “This offers the potential to turn surveillance from something that is reactive – recording pictures of people who have robbed you – into something that is proactive. You can also use voice over these networks to drive a more efficient and proactive response.”

This type of centralised system gives customers protection against false alarms because they have an alarm and a video camera picture of the would-be intruder. The voice capability enables an audible warning to be used as well. This type of set-up, Condron says, has been shown to be something like 96 per cent effective in deterring further action.

There are also going to be plenty of additional opportunities beyond the IP surveillance installation, but they will not be any easier to address, Condron adds.

“There are a significant number of applications, but at the moment they are quite difficult to address because they are all so separate,” he says. “If you go into a corporate or public space control room, you will see CCTV as an application. You’ll also see access control, intruder, fire and building management systems all as applications. If we can integrate all of these separate disciplines and manage the dialogue between them, that adds significant value to the business.”

Access control would be the next logical step forward, says Harris. There are already a number of partnerships developing at the vendor level. After IP surveillance, this is

the biggest and fastest-growing part of the market, although customers need to be careful not to go down the proprietary routes that still exist in the market.

The cost of entry into some of these sectors, Harris adds, is just going to be too high. It is best left to the specialist providers, although IP is being integrated even into these systems now, so there is also a place for bringing information from these systems in IP management applications.

Vendors and integrators are focused on IP and working to open standards. The openness of IP-based systems is what, in the end, will bring the opportunities to integrate all these systems and develop new opportunities. “That is the beauty of this market: it is open,” Bruning says. C

>> Further reading:

www.channelweb.co.uk/2159469

CONTACTS:

ADI-Gardiner Security (01706) 343 343

www.gardinersecurity.co.uk

Anixter (01895) 818 181

www.anixter.co.uk

Axis Communications (0870) 162 0047

www.axis.com

Computerlinks (01638) 569 600

www.computerlinks.co.uk

CNL (01483) 480 088