Every year during the second week of April, thousands of security professionals descend upon Las Vegas to attend ISC West, North America’s largest security trade show. Team members from Stealth Monitoring’s Operations and Technology departments were in attendance as part of our continuing effort to keep up with the latest technology trends and keep us at the forefront of the security industry.
While there are many benefits to attending ISC West, one of the most exciting parts is walking the show floor and looking for new products or technology trends that could change our business. Below are a few of our key findings.
AI Commoditization
Artificial intelligence has proliferated throughout the industry. Last year, it was the most hyped product at the show. This year it became a reality. Many vendors were leveraging free open source technology which made it difficult to find AI that was unique. There were also only a handful of vendors who could claim they owned a patented AI technology. Fortunately, Stealth Monitoring has been tracking AI and deploying it for some time now. What became apparent at this year’s show was who the leaders are in the space from the manufacturing side. We look forward to further partnerships with these companies as we work towards launching more AI solutions as part of our product offerings.
Cloud Services Growing Quickly
Not unlike the rest of the technology industry, we are now seeing more and more manufacturers trying to capture recurring monthly revenue (RMR) by creating Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings. Common SaaS services include video analytics or AI, time-lapse recording, and cloud backup. Cloud backup obviously requires the cloud and has been around for some time, but at a very high cost. AI, on the other hand, is just emerging and in many cases the cloud is making AI affordable for users who could not otherwise afford to pay thousands of dollars for the GPU cards required for most AI applications.
Gunshot Detection
Gunshot detection is still exorbitantly expensive as manufacturers target large government and military applications. We did see new entrants into the space at ISC West, but they were still in the very early stages of building a scalable product. One thing is clear though, gunshot detection will become very cheap and very simple through the use of AI, creating a huge opportunity for innovative manufacturers eager to disrupt this low-competition space in the near future.
Facial Recognition
Facial recognition has been around for a long time. Many manufacturers have tried and failed to succeed in this space, with one of the most well-known facial recognition manufacturers going bankrupt in 2018. Despite the challenges of the past, facial recognition appears to be making a comeback. Largely driven by the growing availability of AI tools, facial recognition was on display at several different booths. The systems all used the same core technology. Vendors attempted to differentiate themselves through unique cases. For example, opening doors for recognized faces, notifying security of known criminals, or presenting targeted advertising for regular customers to a store. In all cases, the technology is still in its infancy, though we continue to test it as it will inevitably become an important part of surveillance systems in the future.
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