Russian lessons: Axxon makes UK entry

08 Dec 09

By Evgenia Ostrovskaya

Evgenia Ostrovskaya, head of global business development at open platform video management system firm Axxon, on how her company’s 10 years of large-scale securityy implementation experience have been applied in building its new professional video management platform Smart Pro.

The key in any video management system today is to recognise the importance of offering an open architected interface for easy ‘plug and play’ integration of data channels, whether these are coming from an intercom help point, access control system, fire alarm, ANPR detector, CCTV or IP camera, either generating analogue or IP data feeds.

It is not about trying to lock customers in through surrounding them with proprietary functionality. That thinking is outmoded now.

In fact, Axxon’s high-end enterprise system called Intellect started its life by integrating other vendors’ analogue-based fire alarm and access control systems situated in the entrances of buildings around Moscow, into its video management software over 10 years ago.

It is this analogue pedigree which means it is better placed than many to handle hybrid systems which will be the norm in the UK for some time to come.

Having an IPINT
It was only five years ago that the Intellect platform perfected its IP interface platform (IPINT) so that it could take feeds from IP as well as analogue-based CCTV cameras.

Intellect was also built for robustness, scalability and to keep operating costs down in a challenging environment from an infrastructure point of view.

Axxon has now proved this point: Intellect today handles more than 175,000 channels (a mixture of audio help points/intercoms and cameras) around one of the largest cities in the world - Moscow.

It can take feeds from nearly all IP and analogue cameras and an array of other devices and systems with very little set up time.

Interoperability
Its key differentiator from some of its competitors is its focus on ‘bullet-proof’ interoperability right down to hardware level. In doing this work Axxon goes beyond opening itself up to accepting a camera’s API (Application Programming Interface) to make sure all of the functionality of the camera works.

Again, unlike some of its competitors, it does all this integration work for free. It is this degree of technical commitment and rigour that is likely to win it some friends over the next 10 years as camera manufacturers themselves are building additional functionality such as analytics into their devices to help them stay ahead of the competition.

To manage video management on such a giant-scale in this setting requires technical know-how which reaches beyond integration capability and into network infrastructure optimisation to enable users to move data around, store, view and manage it effectively and at low cost.

Axxon has over 100 software engineers moving the platform forward and working with hardware providers, including the likes of Panasonic, JVC, Bosch and Cisco, to ensure that all key hardware from the ubiquitous Digital Video Recorder to the office server, can install Intellect and Smart Pro inside them.

DVR-centric
In fact Axxon sees one of the big opportunities for its Smart Pro software is for it to be installed inside other manufacturers’ DVRs going forward. Because DVRs naturally sit as the central video management device for many hybrid security systems in the UK, this approach makes good sense over here.

Further know-how that Axxon has today stems from managing compressed video streams. An ability to handle all compression algorithms including its own Motion Wavelet and key industry-agreed compression algorithms such as MJPEG, MPEG-4 and H.264, is only half the battle.

Axxon has also written software to intelligently manage the simultaneous decompression of images (from multiple streams of images using different compression formats) so that they are not all automatically unpacked unless this is needed for the purposes of post-event analysis.

Simultaneous handling
Many H.264-ready IP cameras today also stream MPEG-4 or MJPEG compressed images at the same time and all these streams must be handled effectively (and simultaneously) by the video management system. Axxon has ensured that it is able to handle all key compression algorithms simultaneously.

It has gone beyond this to build in VideoGate which works by consolidating video streams and dynamically adjusting frame rate levels according to the bandwidth availability on the WAN links that are being used to transfer data.

This network and data traffic management functionality stems from recognition of the challenges of moving data between distributed sites across such a sprawling city where network and cabling infrastructure is not uniformly up to modern standards.

Network infrastructure constraints have been a fact of life for all the major video management projects that Axxon has worked on across Russia in recent years. It had to design a solution which could still operate effectively in bandwidth-constrained environments.

The fact that Axxon has designed Intellect for this sort of resource-constrained world stands customers in Western Europe in very good stead.

Fine-tuning
Customers of SmartPro (as well as Intellect) will be able to fine-tune their systems to help them reduce network bandwidth, data storage consumption and increase data transfer speeds.

The net result is a system which is also designed to distribute security data rather than pumping all data into a central location which not only costs more but creates a single point of vulnerability.

The key is to be able to see the location of the video images ‘logically’ rather than physically from a PC from wherever you are.

Further work has been done by Axxon in the area of video content analytics. Although Axxon has developed its own analytics software within Intellect, it has concentrated more in recent years on making sure that the best and most widely used analytics software providers are able to feed straight into Intellect.

Through catering for both best-of-breed and lower cost ‘entry-level’ suppliers in all key areas (access control, analytics, intrusion detection, building management, fire alarms etc) it is able to bring intelligent video management to many more customers, more quickly. Openness works best yet again.

The work on Intellect to ensure that it integrates with vertically-aligned systems can also bring value to mid-sized systems with SmartPro.

POS integration
Axxon has conducted a programme of offering tight integration with all major retail Point Of Sale (POS) systems, for example. This work puts Axxon in a unique position of offering a relatively low cost, fully integrated retail security solution which is able to run POS data from shop cash tills, alongside video images from surveillance cameras and generate alerts which will help retail managers spot cashier theft.

Employee theft makes up more than a third of all retail theft and is valued at more than £1.5 billion (Source: British Retail Consortium Retail Crime Report) per year in the UK alone.

Because SmartPro will be backed by more than 10 years experience, during which vertical sector modules have already been built, there are unlikely to be any sector-specific integration challenges that are not resolvable.

Standards-conscious
Axxon is also set to work with industry standards bodies like ONVIF to help speed up creation of code-level standards for interoperability to make integration with new products that much quicker and reduce the technical resources associated with building, checking and testing interfaces.

It is becoming clear that giant-sized video management software (built for public security projects), if architected correctly, can be scaled and tailored to deliver superb value just as Intellect’s market-specific security modules for Retail POS, bank ATMs, public road Automatic Number Plate Recognition-based traffic monitoring, as well as its sea container and rail security applications, have already proved.

This is true no matter how many types and numbers of channels are present. Axxon hopes to prove this as SmartPro is implemented in 2010.

Credits :

Smart Pro will be publicly launched across Europe from the first quarter of 2010. It is aimed at hybrid, small and mid-sized professional security installations. It will be followed by a new version of Intellect later in 2010.

Axxon will sell through channel-appointed distributors, systems integrators, network integrators and traditional security installers only.