The global video surveillance market was worth $56.9 billion in 2022, and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.4% up to 2030, according to analyst house Grand View Research. In fact, fellow analyst MarketAndMarkets predicts the market will reach $83.3 billion by 2028, with a large chunk of this business continuing to come through the channel.
IT Europa is in Malmo, Sweden this week talking to one of the main players in the video surveillance market, Axis Communications, to find out more about the channel opportunity, and what is now driving new market openings. The Swedish company, which is a subsidiary of Japan’s Canon, was holding its OPEN Malmo event for customers and partners, one of a series of international roadshows that started at Wembley, London last October.
Grand View Research says growth is driven by increasing security demands in private and public places, such as schools, airports, businesses, and homes. The emergence of smart cities also necessitates intelligent video surveillance for monitoring various activities. Also, cloud-based systems are gaining traction for their scalability and cost-efficiency, said the analyst, and advancements like AI and deep learning are enhancing surveillance effectiveness, “contributing to the industry's significant expansion in the years ahead”.
Key players in the market include Hangzhou Hikvision Digital Technology, Dahua Technology, Robert Bosch, Axis Communications, Motorola Solutions, Zhejiang Uniview Technologies, Tiandy Technologies, TKH Group, Hanwha Vision, and Infinova, among others.
Axis, well before it was acquired by Canon in 2015, is widely regarded as developing the first IP-controlled camera in the late 1990s, and has plenty of patents covering video, audio and even radar surveillance. It is now expanding its reach around cloud, edge, data storage, data analytics and AI products and services. It doesn’t sell direct, only goes through distributors, and works with around 800 technology integration partners as part of its “open” ecosystem strategy.
Axis founder and deputy chairman Martin Gren (pictured), told us: “We are the reseller’s friend, while we don’t have direct relationships with VARs, system integrators and managed service providers, we do all business through distributors, that they can do business with.”
Gren said the distribution model in major markets in Europe, and elsewhere, relied on having a combination of local, national and global distributors, which usually meant having four or five distributors in key European countries.
“We usually target security solutions distributors, but also have relationships with traditional IT distributors, like Ingram Micro and Tech Data, for instance. An important issue for the channel is that we never OEM any of our products either. If it’s an Axis-branded product, it’s always manufactured by us, so resellers know where it’s from, which is important for both support and data security.”
The OPEN Malmo event heard from various Axis executives and partners about evolving opportunities in the cloud, AI, and data analytics, effectively expanding software and services. For a hardware firm, IT Europa wanted to know whether this involved major transformation for Axis.
Gren said: “From the beginning of open-source software we have been an advocate of embedded Linux, and have donated software we have developed to the open-source community. More than 90% of our engineers have been software-focused, and that will continue as other markets open up in cloud, data analytics and AI.”
More to follow from Gren and the OPEN Malmo event...
