Milestone Systems unveils Kite, a VSaaS solution for small- and medium-sized markets

Milestone Systems announced the launch of Milestone Kite, a scalable VsaaS solution for small- to medium-sized businesses that will complement the company’s existing XProtect product on Amazon Web Services.

Milestone describes Kite as a “simple, secure, and scalable VSaaS solution, while its XProtect on AWS is optimized for the enterprise market. To be available in early 2023, Kite will support more than 6,000 camera models from over 100 manufacturers.

The company told strategic partners and media attending the Milestone Partner Summit Tuesday that Kite is ideal for single or distributed organizations that need an easy way to centrally manage all their sites in one unified system.

Providing continuous access to new features with little or no maintenance effort, Milestone said Kite is designed for businesses and enterprises with high value, less complexity and multiple geographic locations such as banks, retail chains, schools, and residential buildings.

Executives said the Kite's launch comes as organizations in almost every industry, who have been moving or planning to move to the cloud for other business-critical functions, have reached a tipping point.

The cloud is a key element of their business strategy to help them be more nimble, more secure, and better able to manage resources. But until now, VMS has had complexities that made it difficult to roll into those broader business strategies, where high data volumes and real-time requirements are two examples.

That’s no longer the case, and IT leaders are looking at how and when they should bring these security and situational analysis tools into their larger cloud strategy, said Milestone Systems CEO Thomas Jensen.  

“Milestone understands and recognizes the importance of offering a range of hybrid-cloud solutions to address different segments of the security market. We have been making investments in VSaaS offerings for many years to prepare for the future,” Jensen said, adding that Kite is a logical choice “as more small- to mid-sized organizations search for a cloud-based video technology solution that is easy to deploy, simple to use, has low bandwidth requirements, is scalable across locations, and is secure.”

Kite offers flexible hybrid video storage with low bandwidth needs, where video data can be stored in the cloud or at the edge, all dependent on available bandwidth.

It also delivers continuous security updates and global backup to guard against failure. It comes with built-in people and vehicle detection, heat maps, and forensic search, turning the video into intelligent data to improve security and increase operational efficiency.

CEO Andreas Pettersson said Arcules was created with a focus on building a “powerful, easy-to-use” cloud offering for smaller organizations or larger ones that are geographically dispersed with satellite or remote locations.

Kite will automatically integrate access control data with the incoming video data to enable access-based video verification, view camera feeds, and obtain immediate situational awareness.

Milestone customers “no longer need to physically visit multiple sites or spend time on maintenance. They can simply install the gateway and be done,” he said.  

“Arcules was created to be at the forefront of innovation with a focus on building a powerful, easy-to-use new cloud offering for smaller organizations or larger organizations geographically dispersed with satellite or remote locations. What we’ve achieved is a cloud-native solution that is future-proof, scalable, and characterized by simplicity.”