Axis heralds 30th year as IP video industry hits tipping point

By Cat Yong

Axis Communications (Axis) is putting their weight behind their recent move to “act very local, but have global coverage.” This emphatic statement by Oh Tee Lee, Regional Director of South Asia Pacific, came on the back of their 30th anniversary and them having also recently appointed a new regional country manager for ASEAN and Indochina.

Ivan Tjahjadi had addressed members of the media during Axis’ 30th anniversary announcement, stating that he was focusing on “…building more structure in terms of resources, processes as foundation to serve customers.”

Although based in Indonesia, Tjahjadi also said increasing Axis’ go-to-market model to ultimately better serve end users, was another focus for him. This overall includes increasing inside sales in Malaysia by bringing traditionally regional resources, in locally to Malaysia, to better manage their system integrators and resellers.

He added, “We would also need engineers locally, to show proof-of-concepts to partners.”

Malaysia’s potential
Oh had described Malaysia as being between a matured market and emerging market. “There is high growth, investments, and high demand for infrastructure growth. This is a major driver for video surveillance take up.”

He also noted that network video market share had stagnated at 20 percent for quite a long while, but in the last 3 years, this percentage has increased, a sign of more widespread acceptance at last. 

Oh forecasted, “2014 is the year when there would be more digital surveillance in some countries and some verticals. For the enterprise, this tipping point was reached 5 years ago.”

Most of the large projects in Malaysia are also IP-based, and Oh named the Iskandar development and city surveillance projects as two examples of such.

“Government projects could involve thousands of cameras. Commercial projects typically have 200 to 300 cameras,” Oh explained.

Asia’s contribution to Axis’ revenue is 9 to 12 percent compared to Europe and US which have a combined 50 percent total. Asia’s growth rate of 30 percent last year however, outpaced the global growth rate of 20 percent.

Axis’ technology 
Axis’s solutions have come a long way since 1984. With its video camera and video encoder chip, ARTPEC-5, already in its 5th iteration, low frame rates and low resolution are a thing of the past.

ARTPEC-5 is already able to support 4K technology, the latest generation of HDTV standards, that has 4 times more pixels than HDTV 1080p. Available in its AXIS P1428-E network camera, Oh however admits that the theoretical 120fps (frames per second) that comes with the standard, has to be scaled down to 30fps in practice.

“ARTPEC-5  has lots of excess capacity, but until the infrastructure can support 120fps, it has to be scaled down,” he explained.

The chip’s increase in processing power also enhances capabilities for intelligent video processing and more video analytics applications. Security cameras are meant to deter unsavoury activities, enable forensics after the event, and allow organisations to be proactive, although Oh admits that many in the security world are not in the proactive mode.

He shared, “Video analytics can allow cameras to be more intelligent and (organisations) to be more proactive.”

To further move the IP surveillance video industry along towards a proactive mode and higher resolution 4K-based video, an upcoming new compression standard, H.265 or High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) which can potentially save bandwidth by as much as 50 percent, is also just around the corner.




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