Surveillance industry helping the country to fight against the COVID-19 outbreak

In this unprecedented time of COVID-19 outbreak, the surveillance industry has seen a sudden rise in demand. From Indian railways to even small scale industries, every verticals weather big or smallhas to install surveillance cameras. Today, workplaces continuously need to identify people with high body temperature. The available technology integrated into cameras for thermal screening allows us to monitor and identify people with slightly high temperatures at workplaces. This testing can help enterprises to manage the spread of the virus and safeguard their employees. 

Another key element in successfully overcoming the challenges posed by the spread of COVID-19 has been the use of data from surveillance technologies. Data plays a significant role in the smart video solution space and needs to be stored for analysis. The absence of proper data storage makes AI-powered smart video solution space very limited in its scope. 

As health workers tend to patients, experts in the use of modern surveillance technologies are working behind the scenes to deploy technology to prevent the fast spread of the disease across the nation. The Health Ministry and police departments are adopting AI based video surveillance to stop the spread and identify mask rule violators.

While adding more cameras broadens security coverage across sites, it also entails more data being stored. Similarly, employing higher capture rates and frame resolution improves image quality, but at the expense of increased capacity needs. Video archiving also plays an important role in determining how much drive capacity is needed. While short-term archiving can entail enormous quantities of data, extended archival periods only exacerbate capacity requirements. 

There is also a wide acceptance for smart video security across consumer and enterprise sectors. A new forecast from International Data Corporation (IDC) estimates the worldwide video surveillance camera market will grow to $44 billion by 2025, up from $23.6 billion in 2019, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of nearly 13%. That means there will be immense need for right kind of storage- as in the storage solutions developed for smart video or smart video security segments.   

Growth in Video Surveillance Industry 

The video surveillance market in India was expected to top US$ 2.4 billion by 2020. The ever-increasing requirement of safety, coupled with boom in smart cities has led to a rise of security and surveillance market in the country. Government initiatives such as the development of 100 Smart Cities and Digital India campaign also adds to the overall growth of the industry. Advancement of infrastructure and cities, residential complexes offer a sea of opportunities to the growing security industry in India.Today’s video surveillance storage is strenuous and critical enough to warrant a centralized, enterprise-class yet secure and private storage approach.

On this context Kaushal Veluri, Director of Channels, NetApp India says, “We are currently seeing a huge demand in this sector as NetApp provides several state governments, municipal corporations, airports and police departments with modern video surveillance infrastructure to fuel powerful video analytics applications and to solve business problems in innovative ways. NetApp E-Series storage is an ideal infrastructure towards building a robust video surveillance system. As a SAN (block-based storage) device, it offers the video management solutions and analytics technologies direct, super-fast access to data. It also enables the customers to take scale up without having to incur downtime. We collaborate with global surveillance partners such as Axis communications, Milestone, Bosch Security Systems, Genetec and more to provide intelligent video analytics and video-image data management.”

Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications, India SAARC sees the pandemic has acted as both a boon and a bane for industries, one of them being a surveillance sector. This will continue to see a boom in the manufacturing, government, smart city and critical infrastructure segments, where a growth might be seen for securing the premises. 

On the video surveillance market he says, “We might experience a dip with regards to industries related to tourism, aviation and hospitality. With respect to government initiated projects, we again expect a rise in businesses especially for projects related to social distancing monitoring and surveillance of office buildings whereas some government projects have been put on hold at the moment due to pending investments. Now, in terms of market segmentation, we might experience both a dip and a growth. This is because some organizations might opt for cost cutting solutions whereas some companies might prioritize quality. We hold the heritage of delivering the highest standard products and solutions and hence the cost can be a parameter in the decision making for organizations. However, our Total cost of Ownership is beneficial for reducing the operating and maintenance costs in the long term. Hence, organizations will need to think in a digital-first approach by evolving and aligning to the industry’s overall goals.”

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole world has been forced to go for the lockdown irrespective of business and services – except Essential Services. Time to time government has given few relaxations to operate with limited work force. Fortune Marketing – being a distribution house of IT and Security Products, have to face a lot of difficulty in this phase.

According to Manoj Gupta, MD & CEO, Fortune Marketing, products like Face Recognition with Temperature Detection is a great product which is seeing a good demand in the industry. Products like body temperature screen cameras are also seeing a surge in demand in IT Industry. Corporate and industries are shifting to these products to safe-guard their working atmosphere. He says, “We have started operation from May 4th 2020 with limited manpower to cater to the requirement of the partners in IT Industry. If we consider the situation in present scenario as compared to past few months, then situation is quite better. Also, there are quite lesser demands from the industry regarding IT Products.”

Khalid Wani, Director, Channel Sales, Western Digital India perceives that India is close to global trends in terms of adopting smart video technology. He says, “We are witnessing a natural momentum for the deployment of smart video solutions in the post lockdown scenario. To ensure a safe and secure workplace in the enterprise, we observe a clear need to track physical distancing and how people are managing and behaving at workplaces.”

Depicting about their business standpoint, he says, “We offer WD Purple microSD card or WD purple HDD purpose-built solutions that provide high quality and long-lasting storage for workloads that consumer microSD cards and desktop-grade hard drives are not specifically designed for. We run consistent and robust partner programs to armor our partners to change consumer needs, market dynamics, and educate them on our products and solutions. ”

In the words of Ashish P. Dhakan, MD & CEO, Prama Hikvision India,a safe reopening process will rely heavily on effective public health strategies, including increased testing for the virus, social distancing, occupancy restrictions, and cleaning and disinfection activities. Prama Hikvision has been striving hard to provide innovative products and solutions to combat the pandemic situation. The innovative security solutions that are helping to comply with health and safety guidelines are witnessing a surge in demand from across the verticals. These solutions are enabling businesses and enterprises to detect, protect and comply with norms. 

Prama Hikvision’s innovative technology solutions are the shining examples of innovation in the pandemic situation. He says, “Our research and development teams have risen to the occasion and developed entirely new solutions and newer applications.  Our latest products and solutions innovatively use the Thermal, Facial Recognition, AI Detection and Deep Learning technologies. The critical solutions related to Temperature Screening, Contactless Access Control, Face Recognition, Flow Control Solutions (Crowd Flow, Crowd Density and Social Distancing) are experiencing an uptick.  These innovative solutions are extremely helpful in managing organisations and employees as they are getting back to work.”

Seagate caters to all the requirements that support the modern-day surveillance systems, which now have specific requirements that differ from regular IT storage. Surveillance companies are looking for high bandwidth and high I/O solutions. High I/O drives like Seagate’s groundbreaking MACH.2 multi-actuator hard drive design has gained prominence. Through MACH.2, it is possible to move more input and output through the unit more rapidly, and double the performance of data-intensive applications without sacrifices in latency. 

Sameer Bhatia, Director Asia Pacific Consumer Business Group and Country Manager SAARC & India, Seagate Technology thinks surveillance is one of the fastest growing segments outside of the cloud and data centers, moving from being an endpoint application to an edge application. India has become one of the most prominent and fast-growing market within APJ region for video surveillance.

At Seagate, they understand that the drive capacity is a key consideration for high-quality surveillance solutions geared for multi-site environments due to increased storage requirements. He explains, “With the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) and its ability to enable deeper analytics, video surveillance systems can now provide many additional benefits outside of their traditional applications including - heat detection, motion detection and other behavior analytics. A video-based security system is as good as the storage infrastructure behind it, and therefore, an efficient video surveillance system for an organization requires a robust and purpose-built storage infrastructure such as the offerings from Seagate. A notable example in this regard is the Seagate SkyHawk surveillance hard drive. Leveraging 24×7 workloads up to 16TB with drives designed for DVR and NVR systems, SkyHawk surveillance drives enable better performance in video surveillance environments via enhanced ImagePerfect and are equipped with drive-monitoring software - SkyHawk Health Management - designed for prevention, intervention, and recovery. These innovations help customers sail through their toughest challenges.”

 
On Business Continuity

During the period of lockdown and the process of unlocking, the industries have faced many hurdles to continue seamless business operations. But the employees are working hard to deliver the best service to the customers. 

NetApp India’s Kaushal Veluri feels, in the last 100 days, enterprises have been working on two critical challenges: enhanced employee experience and business operations continuity. He says, “We activated our plan to enable us to continue to deliver products and services and minimize any disruptions that could impact businesses. Our constant endeavor is to put measures in place to keep our employees, customers, and partners safe and ensuring the workforce has support through digital collaboration tools to continue conducting business safely from their homes. For NetApp, our partners have played a critical role in enabling customers to achieve their business goals, especially during the pandemic. We are working closely with our partner ecosystem to enable them to drive growth and focus on customer success. We announced several initiatives specifically designed to empower partners free the cash flow, plan business continuity, and focus on driving business growth.”

At Axis Communications, one of the first stepsthey took towards supporting their customers is by briefing their employees to be responsive during this crisis. Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications, India SAARC says, “We are constantly available on calls, emails and other medium of communication. As part of our global organizational guidelines, being responsive to our customers, partners and distributors and the ecosystem is a prerogative. Along with that we are keeping the continuity in terms of the technical support and ensuring that tech support is available 24*7 with our online chatbot. So that if there is a challenge with a camera, then the customers should not be impacted. Our tech support team is working from home and trying to resolve the problems to the best of their capacity.”

He feels, with Unlock 1.0, and reopening of courier services, the problem that they initially witnessed with solving hardware issues had been resolved at a domestic level. Commenting on that, he says, “Even with the international cargo shipment running full swing, along with the manufacturers and Axis configuration and logistics centres, 80-90% of our supply chain is back to normal. We also have maintained round-the clock correspondence with our distributors and top focused partners while keeping them updated with information to ensure a smooth business continuity. However, we also make sure that our partners and distributors have end-to-end information of the total functioning to maintain transparency, especially in cases where the lead time is more than usual. Starting from the phase 1 of lockdown our priority has been to be transparent in our communication with employees, channel partners, distributors, SI partners and even customers, as part of our business strategy.”

Manoj Gupta of Fortune Marketing is very optimistic about the normalcy is going to be established one again in coming months. Sharing his experience during the past months he says, “To ease out the situation and bring the normalcy in the business, we are trying our hard to reach out to our partner through various channels. Our team is also putting effort to understand the market sentiments. Considering the new normal during this situation, we are trying to take feedbacks from our partners to understand their problems and try to solve them to bring back the normalcy.”

He continues, “Considering the impact of lockdown, our business has been very badly affected as our all business planning is failed and we have to re-start our all plans considering the new normal of the market. Our partners and relationships will definitely help us to get out of this awful situation. Our team is also trying to fulfil the past pending requirements and few of the present demands as created on daily basis. And hopefully by the month of August or September, thing will become back on track.And as per as this quarter is concerned, we are looking quite firm and positive that we will revive and our traditional products will start moving back to normal per se situation around the nation is normal. As of now, our normal products have started moving slowly and also we are looking way ahead to bring our business back on track.”

Western Digital India’s Khalid Wani commenting on the business continuity says, “We have equipped our channel partners with the right information, products, and tools to reach out to potential customers and manage this challenging phase. We are conducting webinar led tech education sessions and have rolled out specific rewards programs to support our partners.We are also launching WD Purple SC QD101 Ultra Endurance microSD card and WD Purple 14TB HDD, both of which are designed for high-endurance, high-capacity, robust, on-camera storage to deliver reliable performance in a mainstream security video system that operates 24/7. We expect a massive jump in the adoption of AI-enabled smart video security industry to track physical distancing, regular sanitization, and body temperature screening. ”

Prama Hikvision has been striving hard in the mission critical mode for the past three months by providing innovative solutions during the pandemic situation. The company had planned and worked extensively to ensure the wellbeing of employees, channel partners and end-users, their safety and health has remained our top priority in these challenging times.

On the business continuity Ashish P. Dhakan says, “We are keeping our customers well informed and updated through the various communication channels. As the lockdown is being eased in a phased manner across the country, we are bracing for the agile spirit and resilience in every phase to serve the customers’ requirements. We are ensuring the strict adherence to, health and safety guidelines, while meeting the customers’ needs through our branches across India. We are overwhelmed by the outstanding support shown by our channel partners and end-users during the lockdown phase. We truly value the enormous trust shown by the key stakeholders. It is critical to be vigilant in our response to the activities that make up our daily operations. We are prioritizing agility to ensure the business continuity and well-being of our employees, clients and community.”

He also expects a rise in demand due to specific requirements driven by the pandemic situation. He hopes that the Indian security market will regain its growth in the coming months. The third quarter revenues will help the businesses to regain the normalcy. The Indian security market has lots of resilience; hope is there that it will bounce back by tapping new opportunities and offering newer solutions. 

At Seagate, the strategy is to jointly engage, educate, and listen to their distributors and partners for growth and continuous improvement. Seagate has been continuously building a robust partner base by providing comprehensive training sessions and seminars as well as working on co-marketing initiatives to help partners in effectively delivering solutions that enterprises and consumers need. With the SkyHawk Partner app partners can calculate their storage needs and investment that could be required on the spot. 

Sameer Bhatia says, “We organize ‘SkyHawk Surveillance Week’ across multiple cities which attract the highest concentration of our partner stores. Our partners have unparalleled peer insight and expertise on business strategy, innovation, and leadership, as we build a robust partnership network with them. Seagate's SkyHawk Surveillance Week now spans across 12 cities, catering to over 300 partner stores.  Seagate’s SkyHawk Partner App shows how we empower our partners and customers. Designed specifically for India, the SkyHawk Partner App enables partners to calculate the storage and investment requirements on the spot. It also provides online warranty service booking and tracking, and provides instant connectivity to Sea Carecentres.”

Explaining on the process of business continuity Sameer says, “With the emergence of IT 4.0, our focus for this year is to help partners drive profitability by enabling them to embrace and monetize the new opportunities around edge computing and artificial intelligence (AI). We connect with our customers and partners in the markets through the Seagate Insider partner program. In addition to regular products and technology trainings, Seagate also provides its partners to better understand evolving opportunities.This year we also redesigned and opened a hi-tech LaCie Showroom in March to provide better tech experience to our customers.”

Sameer is confident that that these programs and activities will continue to cement their position as a market leader in the storage, software and system industries, while also enhancing their channel growth rapidly.

It can be said that, though the year 2020 is not so fruitful from the beginning but the industrialists are hopeful about the coming months as they see growth, success and business continuity to boost. It has been predicted in the year 2018, that the video surveillance market in India is expected to top US$ 2.4 billion by 2020. As it has been correctly expected that the surveillance industry will grow, the pandemic has also acted as a catalyst and boosted this market more than expectation.