Just over a decade ago, Cisco, one of the world’s leading providers of IT infrastructure technology, made its entrance in the physical security industry with the launch of its own line of network video surveillance solutions. This was also around the same time that adoption of IP-enabled products began to really take hold in the market and the entrance of Cisco was confirmation to many that the heyday of analog was over.
Indeed, some industry analysts even wondered if Cisco would seek to gain a dominant share of the video surveillance market given their background in IT and how the market was becoming increasingly connected at such a rapid pace. However, the video surveillance industry today remains just as fragmented as it was when Cisco made its initial foray and companies are now looking well beyond the IP tipping point to myriad other ways they can differentiate themselves from the competition and improve the user experience.
Cisco itself has flown relatively under the radar over the past several years in the physical security space but it is looking to make its presence felt once again with the debut of its MV22 and MV72 cameras as well as its new MV Sense analytics tool. The MV series of solutions are from the Meraki business unit, which was acquired by Cisco in 2012.
According to George Bentinck, Product Manager for Camera Systems at Cisco Meraki, Meraki began as a tech startup in 2006 that was focused on wireless mesh networking. As the founders built the company out, however; they realized that what people liked more about their products than wireless mesh communications was the cloud-scale management infrastructure that helped them manage and control all of their wireless access points.
“Essentially, the core philosophy of Meraki is about simplification of complex systems without making them less powerful or removing capabilities,” Bentinck says. “Everything is managed through one web interface called the dashboard. There are no servers of any kind for any of our products; there are no virtual machines or software packages. Everything is managed from our cloud infrastructure, which we operate and maintain for all of our customers as a service.”
The same applies to the company’s surveillance camera portfolio, according to Bentinck, who says that they have essentially eliminated all of the infrastructure associated with a typical enterprise video deployment.
“There is no NVR or VMS and there are no servers of any kind. And, importantly, we don’t store video in the cloud; we store everything in the camera,” he explains. “We found customers don’t want any of this infrastructure and had bad things to say about it when we were researching development of a camera product, but they were often very bandwidth constrained, so putting video in the cloud is a big challenge for them. If you think about, say a retail organization that has 12 to 16 cameras at a site, they may just have a T1 connection with 1.5 megabits of upload speed, so storing video in the cloud is something they wouldn’t be able to do.”
Bentinck says they have based their latest cameras – the MV22 indoor varifocal camera and the MV72 outdoor varifocal camera – on the advancements made in the mobile phone hardware industry. The cameras feature up to 256 gigabytes of embedded solid state storage as well as a Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that enables them to provide advanced video analytics from inside the camera itself without any servers. The cloud is used for managing and operating all the cameras in order to aggregate all of the data.
And while video will still be stored on the cameras themselves, the company is rolling out a cloud archive features for those customers that require offsite backup or need to retain footage for longer periods of time than the average user.
Cisco Meraki’s camera system also features end-to-end encryption.
“Security seems to have been an afterthought for most camera manufacturers for some time while it’s a core part of Cisco’s business and something we think about every day because we work in networking infrastructure,” Bentinck explains. “What this means is all of the storage in the camera is encrypted. We use AES 256-bit encryption, it’s on by default and it’s mandatory, so you can’t turn it off, and it’s zero configuration.”
Customized Analytics
In addition, Cisco Meraki is introducing MV Sense, which is suite of machine learning algorithms embedded in the cameras that allows customers to create their own custom analytic applications.
“In February, we premiered our latest cameras with its new powerful hardware that does object detection, classification and tracking in real time at up to 8 frames per second. All of this information about where people are going, moving and so on is incredibly interesting to our customers to build business applications on and we’re now going to be exposing our full suite of APIs to let them do that and build customized analytics for their business without being machine learning or computer vision experts,” Bentinck adds.
Indeed, while many in the both IT and security industries are excited about the prospects of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, the fact is that few customers can afford it and even those that can are having to make significant infrastructure investments to receive any kind of benefit. Bentinck says that Cisco Meraki wants to “democratize” this technology and make it available for the masses.
Closed CCTV Ecosystem
Ultimately, Bentinck says the goal of the company is to reduce the capital and operating expenditures of video surveillance end-users. However, while much of the market has taken the “best-of-breed” approach to addressing this challenge, Cisco Meraki has opted for a closed ecosystem.
“One of the ways I look at it is that it is sort of like buying an Apple product where you have it very tightly integrated to multiple parts of the ecosystem, so if I go buy some apps I can have them on my iPad and on my Mac using the iCloud so it’s very simple but it’s difficult, not impossible, to integrate some third-party pieces,” Bentinck says. “What we have with our camera infrastructure where we manage the device directly, all of the security that we use and all of the analytics and storage in the camera is so specific to how we operate; it means we don’t support other camera systems on our cloud infrastructure. As an example, we don’t support ONVIF on any of the products that we have and it’s not our plan to do so.”
When it comes to other security systems, however; the company is open to allowing customers to integrate other technologies though the use of APIs.
“What we do plan on building is the ability for customers to integrate via industry standard APIs. For example, we don’t have access control or point-of-sale (systems)… so we allow them to do that using industry standards, such as RESTful,” Bentinck says. “We’re not going to be following sort of the traditional physical security surveillance industry track… we want to make it as simple as possible and the only we can do that is if we own the system end to end.”
About the Author:
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
