Following several years of broadening its Internet of Things (IoT) product portfolio to include a variety of ancillary security devices, such as IP-enabled speakers, radar and body-worn cameras, Axis Communications this week announced several new products that will see the company place a renewed focus on its primary products lines in video surveillance and access control.
Among these new solutions include the latest release of the AXIS Camera Station video management software, which now includes a feature dubbed, "Secure Entry,” that provides video-verified access control. The solution – designed to work with the company’s A1601 Network Door Controller and Axis card readers – can manage up to 128 doors per server and up to 10,000 cardholders with support for multiple credentials. Secure Entry is included in all AXIS Camera Station licenses, and one license is needed for each door controller.
Although Secure Entry will help provide its customers with a more unified video management and access control system, Fredrik Nilsson, Vice President for the Americas at Axis, said that the solution in no way signals any intent on the company’s part to become a pure-play access control vendor.
“When we started to put out this concept of an end-to-end solution addressing ease of use, specification and installation for the market that is more medium-level installations, we very often got the feedback, ‘what about access control? That would be a great thing to integrate as well.’ We took that feedback to heart, but we don’t have any ambition to be a pure access control player,” emphasized Nilsson during a virtual briefing with members of the media on Wednesday. “We need to remember that AXIS Camera Station is, first and foremost, a video platform to which we added access control. In the access control space, we still have a very big focus on partners to integrate AC1601 controllers into their systems, but when it comes to integration in general of video and access control, that can really bring a lot of extra value to security systems and, we talked about it before, that extra information or I dare say, intelligence, into the system that makes it even more useful.”
Additionally, the company announced that it would be releasing version four of its AXIS Camera Application Platform (ACAP) that will give third-party developers the ability to build solutions for Axis devices leveraging an open standard API. Among the key features of the latest version of ACAP include:
- Support for running container-based applications on the device;
- Adoption of known open, de-facto software frameworks and industry-standard APIs;
- Support for high-level programming languages;
- And, Deep Learning (DL) toolchain and API.
According to Steve Burdet, Manager of Solutions Management at Axis, this latest evolution in ACAP was driven by the processing power that was built into two the company’s most recent camera releases – the Q1615 Mk III and P3255-LVE.
“To leverage that processing power, we needed to update our AXIS Camera Application Platform or ACAP to a new version that leverages the tools out there that developers are using to get those Deep Learning analytics onto the edge and into the market,” Burdet said during the briefing. “Certainly, we’re going to have a lot more edge analytics out there as a result of this; the market has evolved where it is not just on the edge and historically, a lot of things have been on a server, but even now with the introduction of cloud, it is important to know that applications need spread across horizontally where they can be on the edge, on a server, on the cloud, or maybe spread across different parts to all of them. That why with ACAP 4 we introduced a container-based logic that enables the developers to write their applications so that they can do just that. The user doesn’t have to worry, ‘was this application developed for the cloud or for the edge or somewhere else?’ It allows them to just leverage the good value that comes with it.”
When asked how ACAP fits into how the company is working with other application platforms, such as AWS Panorama, Nilsson said that they will work in tandem with one another.
“Openness kind of drives innovation and when it comes to ACAP 4 and Panorama from Amazon, I think they are complementary in the sense that they can take information and they can take things that are running on the camera now in ACAP 4 and further enhance it in the cloud, again going back to that containerized approach to development and applications,” he added.
Joel Griffin is the Editor-in-Chief of SecurityInfoWatch.com and a veteran security journalist. You can reach him at [email protected].
