Salient Systems Has Eye On IoT With Video Surveillance Management Platform

Salient Systems – a longtime force in video surveillance – is taking its CompleteView VMS platform into the booming Internet of Things market.

Tom Chamard, executive vice president of global sales at Salient Systems, said CompleteView VMS' ability to quickly render and manage video surveillance over a WAN or LAN makes it a "compelling" offering for solution providers looking to gain a foothold in IoT.

"The manner through which we process the video is very efficient, and we can render the video and do forensics on the video rapidly," he said.

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As more businesses look to video surveillance as an IoT application, the CompleteView VMS platform – which can be integrated with other software packages – will enable partners to work with customers to solve specific problems through big data and analytics capabilities, according to Chamard.

For instance, Salient Systems has worked with a retail store to install a video surveillance system that helped it track personnel behavior and marketing trends and keep tabs on potential theft and liability claims, he said.

"In retail we have customers leveraging our platform to optimize their merchandising processing, traffic flow, and where to position goods in their store," Chamard said. "Those kinds of analytics can run on that infrastructure and it's an example of how we interface with IoT functionality.

"In terms of vertical expertise, there are integrators that cater to a narrow scope, in the health-care field, for instance," he added. "VARs with these specializations are critical for us," Chamard said. "We also want to focus on what life after a sale looks like … it's something we believe sets us apart, and once partners deploy something they go to great lengths to make sure they're continuing to deliver on the customer's end."

Austin, Texas-based Salient Systems was founded in 1995 to focus on the medical imaging business, and over the past two decades has morphed into offering its platform for video verification, intrusion systems and alarm-based offerings.

This transformation has continued as the video surveillance market has evolved, with the rising popularity of IP cameras versus analog cameras. IP cameras are easy to construct and have optimized image quality and enable customers to integrate cloud and big data analysis into their smart security monitoring, as well as store video data in the cloud – which is crucial with the advent of IoT.

Chris Compton, founder of Smart Home HQ, a Newport, Ky.-based service provider specializing in home automation, said he is seeing increased interest in video surveillance as an IoT application across multiple verticals.

’Companies like retail stores may have hundreds of cameras in their stores, and they are looking for video that can ingest and analyze that data and send it up to the cloud,’ said Smart Home HQ's Compton.

Salient Systems' Chamard said he hopes to continue to help partners capitalize on opportunities where they can leverage a recurring revenue model with video management solutions in vertical markets.

"Our goal is to optimize our capacity to deliver and support our channels, and continue to build those out," he said. "There's certainly stiff competition in the [video management system] space, so our challenge is to remain at the forefront of customers' minds and create the capacity to tell our story."