“Ahead of us now, it’s a different game. In the future economy, companies will deliver the most value through collaboration. The products of the future are solutions, and to get the solution they want, customers will combine products from different vendors. This requires technology that makes combined solutions very easy to use and brings more innovation. Together with our open platform community, we are stepping into this future, setting the agenda and changing the rules,” said Lars Thinggaard, President & CEO, Milestone Systems.

Topics addressed by speakers, industry panelists and interactive breakout sessions highlighted how new initiatives from Milestone mark a move from products to solutions, with the intention to incite continual interaction through the global open platform community of partners and customers. Milestone Diamond Partner Stone Security spoke about ‘Betting Your Business on the Community’, illustrating his company’s growing success with the open platform by showing a video of their annual university conference where education customers network to share knowledge about their technology experiences.

A lively industry panel discussed the impact on business of commoditisation from lower-priced Asian vendors. Camera manufacturers Axis, Arecont Vision, Samsung and Sony touted the higher value success criteria of good technical support, integration APIs, more innovation and the importance of partnering. Product reliability is greater with testing, certification and rugged durability – especially for the more critical security installations. The ‘anthill’ of low-end competitors coming up in the market was noted, with the internet ‘becoming its own animal’ for sales that include no warranties or service such as those provided by the tier 1 vendors.

A Milestone Solutions Partner panel had an interesting mix of perspectives from all sides of the security industry to look at future trends, sharing their opinions on what’s next in the industry: thoughts on 4K expectations, recording at the edge, cloud technology progress and its potential impact, big data storage and gleaning intelligence with analytics.