It is an open platform community event engaging hundreds of channel and alliance partners, customers, media people, Milestone experts and management. Milestone business activities and product innovations were shared, and 60 solution partners showcased their integrated offerings and services.

This year’s event theme ‘Together We Make the World See the Future’ reflected a newly clarified company purpose. The emphasis is on community focus for the combined solution power of the Milestone open platform and its partners. CEO & President Lars Thinggaard appeared virtually as the audience put on VR headsets to visit beautiful landmarks of Denmark as inspiration to ‘see the future’.

“We can only do this together,” said Kenneth Hune Petersen, Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Milestone, from the stage. “We believe that the co-creation of value is unique to our open platform community.”

Petersen presented the three pillars of the new Milestone community initiatives begun last year, and more are planned in future. The Milestone Marketplace will start with new developments for the Milestone Store, the Solution Finder is evolving into the Solution Portal, and the Developers Forum is expanding. The afternoon was devoted to touring the Community Innovation Lab where Milestone Solution and Technology Partners demonstrated the latest innovations in the industry. 

On day two, Milestone VP Americas Tim Palmquist gave his keynote speech, further developing his topic from last year’s MIPS event: End to End is a Dead End; The Road to the Future is Open. He questioned whether the glory days are over for the surveillance market and recommended a more realistic look at today’s maturing IP market which is experiencing a natural consolidation, product price wars and other competitive factors.

“It’s no longer fast growth and ‘easy money’ like the early phases in a technology lifecycle, so new business models must be developed to encompass the next market disruptions that will come. Milestone’s open platform community offers a framework to succeed – together – leveraging each other’s innovations,” said Palmquist.

Breakout sessions in the afternoon had parallel Technology and Business Tracks covered a variety of topics. “The feedback we are getting from our community is a key element for setting the direction in our product development. We see a big opportunity for high-performing, platform-centric products with strong connectivity. This shift from product to platform thinking applies to both our software and hardware offerings, and is initially addressed in the Xprotect 2017 R1 release,” said Milestone CTO Bjorn Eilertsen.