Open Enterprise Security

Just returning from my trip to Las Vegas for the ISC West trade show.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a lot of attendees there in spite of the economy.  I spoke to several people in their booths and they said the positive of this was that the people attending the show were very serious about security and video surveillance.  In other words, not as many "looky loo's".  Interestingly, just this week I saw where ABI Research reports that even in this economic downturn that the video surveillance market still shows a 10% growth.

 I don't know if it was just my observation but I did feel there were many more vendors this year offering managed services.  Which, in this case refers to monitoring a video surveillance network for the health of the network itself (cameras, DVR/NVR, encoders, etc.)  I still profess that the industry is quickly moving to adopting a hosted model of video surveillance, thus providing opportunity for people who don't want to invest in an IP network (and the support and maintenance of that network), yet have a need for video surveillance.  I'll be interested in comments about this topic as I get wide responses when I bring this up. 

 Along the line of hosted video surveillance, the reason I think this is becoming more of a reality is because the network providers (such as Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola, Ericsson) are all investing in network infrastructures specific to the unique characteristics of streamed video.  And of course this potentially leads into a discussion of network convergence and voice/data/video - which is where physical security as a whole is headed (i.e., integrating video surveillance with access control with building management)...but that's a topic for another day. 

 To bring this back to the whole idea of the network, you can look at any of the network provider websites (those I mentioned above and more) and you will find references to video surveillance.  At Sun, these have been some of our most powerful partners.  I'm excited that with their network infrastructure to support the streaming video and Sun's underlying infrastructure for servers (NVR's once you add a partner ISV's video management software) and our unique approach to data lifecycle management that brings the current high price of storage for video down to ridiculously low price points, we have one of the most compelling offers in this space today.  (Send me a note:shereen.fink@sun.com if you want more information.)