Axis sees strong potential among retailers for video surveillance

Regional manager Nafis Jasmani said the company – which was the first in the world to launch a network camera in 1996 – has grown rapidly over the past five years, during which time it has expanded its workforce from 200 to more than 1,000.

A key driver is the shift from analogue to network video systems, which have offered many benefits to users, he said.

Moreover, Axis’s growth is expected to continue, and a key new focus of the company is the retail sector, which has to date been slow in migrating to digital video surveillance systems.

Despite the slow progress in the retail sector, Axis expects the transformation to accelerate, forecasting that 40-50 per cent of all retailers will move to digital solutions within the next three to four years, compared to 15-20 per cent at present.

Video surveillance systems, or CCTV (closed-circuit television), have traditionally been used for safety and security. Network video solutions, meanwhile, can offer other benefits, including greater loss prevention and improved merchandising and store operations, he said.

“There are also intangible benefits, such as higher efficiency and productivity,” Jasmani said in an exclusive interview with The Nation.

At present, 65 per cent of Axis’s businesses comes from the government, infrastructure and transportation sectors, while enterprise businesses contribute the rest.

“In the retail sector, people are very much analogue. They now want systems to do more for them, such as to lower losses, do people management, stock management, marketing and so on … none of these needs can be met by analogue systems,” he said.

Jasmani said Axis had learnt from its experiences in working with major retailers in the US, where it has already installed 10,000 network cameras, and that it could transfer this knowledge to general retailers worldwide.

Hector Guillermo Martinez, business development lead at US-based technology company EMC International, told The Nation in the same interview that while serving security purposes, network camera surveillance systems could also benefit operators such as airports or department stores, who could sell to their tenants customer intelligence data that is collected and analysed by their digital video systems, and thus earn extra income. 

Such “big data” intelligence involves retail traffic analytics and demographic information on shoppers, he said, adding, “Marketing is a big driver of big data, the same as efficiency.”

An airport in the Australian city of Perth has already implemented such a network surveillance system. 

If a pregnant woman swipes her credit card at a Carrefour store in Singapore, she could find within the next nine months that the store is offering her some baby-food products, said Martinez.

Jasmani, meanwhile, said Thailand offered big potential for network-camera providers thanks to the country’s record of being a strong technology adopter.

Martinez said that in some nations such as Japan and Australia, operators could enjoy lower insurance premiums if they install network-camera surveillance systems. 

A deciding factor is whether the video content is tamper-proof. 

Furthermore, cloud technology helps boost the growth of network camera systems, since users can pay by instalment, instead of having to invest big money upfront for a system, he said.

Most gold shops in Thailand still use analogue video cameras with hard-disk drives, which can record but cannot provide forensic analytics after an incident. 

Axis has already installed surveillance systems at more than five schools and universities in Thailand, and is in talks with many major retail-chain operators.