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From platform to community

Milestone is once again the leading video management platform vendor in the world according to IHS, a position it has held for a number of years with no sign of it losing focus or the number one spot.

The company held its annual Milestone Partner Open Platform Days (MPOP) event, the third such event in Africa, in Johannesburg on the 26th July 2016.

The MPOP 2016 group.

MPOP is a two-day event which saw Milestone giving its partners insight into its plans for the future, and its partners had the opportunity to highlight their relationship with Milestone and promote their systems and solutions. The two days are filled with presentations from various companies as well as an exhibition in which Milestone and its partners show visitors their offerings and get to speak to the visitors. Milestone also hands out awards to its best partners in various categories at a gala dinner on the first evening.

The exhibition this year was well supported with companies showing solutions ranging from access control and surveillance hardware, storage solutions designed for video surveillance and a host of software solutions, including smart city applications. The exhibitors included: Axis Communications, Bosch Security Systems, Stratus, Huawei, Suprema, Promise Technology, Snap Communications, NetApp, Rasilient, Gallagher and Hikvision.

Armand Steffens, Milestone’s South African distribution channel manager, welcomed everyone to the event and highlighted Milestone’s new tagline and commitment to be an Open Platform Community. Steffens noted that the change from an open platform company to a community is indicative of the reality we all experience in the business world today, where working with partners is critical to success.

When a community wins, everyone in the community wins; and this is the path Milestone and its partners are taking. Collaborating with each other allows each partner to offer best-of-breed solutions and work together to deliver value to the customer.

Peter Biltsted, Miletone’s director of the Middle East and Africa then took the stage to drill down into what the company is doing and its vision for the future. Interestingly, he noted that Africa has become Milestone’s biggest area in terms of turnover and the company is responding by putting more feet on the ground in the region.

Peter Biltsted.

Milestone has opened an office in Johannesburg and has three permanent staff on the ground: Armand Steffens, Wesley Trollip and Chris Havinga. It is also in the process of building an experience centre where partners can bring their customers to learn what Milestone and its community can do for them, seeing their solutions in action.

Changing the rules

Continuing the focus on community, Biltsted said 2016 was the year Milestone was changing the rules of the industry (some would say, again). The company understands that it wins when its partners win, and its partners understand that Milestone provides the foundation for their success. The company is therefore determined to work with its partners to enable the collective success of everyone as part of a bigger machine.

Some of the changes it has already made, and some it will still enact to make this collaboration work, including selling partners’ solutions on its website. He stresses that this is for third-party applications from development partners and the company is not going to exclude its global distribution base. Milestone will also be distributing leads to its various partners, depending on their level of certification.

The company has also implemented an advisory board from where partners will have input into the company’s roadmap, influencing and guiding product releases. Milestone has also changed its release schedule and now releases one major release per year, with three follow-up releases during the year to make sure it keeps pace with customer and market requirements.

A developer forum is also being established and Milestone is working on improving and strengthening its SDK (software development kit). Biltsted said the environment everyone operates in is tough and integrators need to go beyond simply installation and maintenance programmes. In a fiercely competitive environment, doing what others do is simply a road to lower margins.

He suggests integrators focus on adding value to their clients with unique integrations and solutions that deliver value – something the customer thinks is of value. In this way the integrator will be able to maintain healthy margins instead of cutting everything to the bone just to get the job. Of course, the key here is to add real value.

Integrators should also note that surveillance is no longer just a security solution, he added. Today it is being used for security as well as operational and compliance functions, with the scope of its utility growing all the time. Locally, SmartProtect is one company that has integrated its solutions into the Milestone platform and will form part of the community being promoted by Milestone. The door is open to others who also want to join the community going forward.

E-learning takes off

To ensure customers get the best deal and see value in their Milestone-based solutions, the company has also improved and will further enhance its training options. E-learning is becoming a key component of the Milestone training agenda, and the company has also stepped up its certification programme. The process of learning what you need to know is simpler via e-learning, but the actual certification exams are harder and partners will need to know their stuff to obtain certifications. E-learning will also be used to educate partners on how to make use of the company’s SDK more effectively.

Certifications will also be expanded for hardware partners, allowing customers the peace of mind to know that specific hardware solutions, such as storage and servers, have been certified by Milestone.

As part of the community, Milestone will facilitate knowledge sharing among its partners and create a platform where insights from partners in the field will be used to determine new directions and functionality for the platform. One of the areas Milestone is working on at the moment is to cater for cloud solutions to match the growing trend among its partner and customer base.

Steffens later delivered a presentation focusing on the learning perspective and noted that from 2017, Milestone will the enforcing the need for partners to be certified as strongly as it can. He went on to explain that the e-learning solutions from the company have been designed by Milestone to fit into anyone’s schedule.

The sessions are broken down into lessons of about 30 minutes each and are freely available online via a computer or tablet. The courses vary from basic topics such as the fundamentals of IP surveillance, through to more technical knowledge on installing and configuring Husky (for example), and many more. The e-learning library will be expanded over time.

To support the training drive, Steffens noted that training helps partners to grow their profit. The longer a technician takes to solve a problem for a customer, the costlier it becomes as he/she is unable to do anything else until the situation is resolved. Skilled employees will solve problems faster and get onto the next client.

As far as certifications are concerned, partners will be able to opt for the following revamped qualifications:

• Certified design engineer.

• Certified integration technician.

• Certified integration engineer – the most advanced certification.

He stressed that the learning component and the examination is separate. It’s not a matter of attending a class and getting a certificate. You will learn online at your own pace and then write an examination that will test your actual knowledge.

Steffens also highlighted the requirements for channel partner classification – Silver, Gold, and Platinum. These are different levels of partnerships based on the certified people working for the integrator and a few other conditions. The level of support channel partners receive is based on their level of certification. Existing partners will retain their current certification, but when it expires they will need to adhere to the new rules. New partners will need to comply from the start.

Technical advances

Milestone solutions engineer, Haider Muhammed spoke about the product roadmap for the company. He reiterated the company’s accelerated innovation strategy which will see a release every four months and highlighted some of the technology available now.

Milestone Husky.

For example, the Husky M20 was launched as an all-in-one solution including a PoE switch, and is preloaded with software and configured for 8 or 16 channels. It supports hardware acceleration on processor and is a full solution you simply need to plug in and use. There is an online Husky calculator, which advises you on which product to choose.

At the other end of the Husky scale, the M500 Advanced has been released and it supports 512 HD cameras (720p HD cameras, H.264, 30fps, 1 Mb/s Video Stream with VMD (video motion detection) operated on the edge device) with a guaranteed recording performance of 600 Mb/s. (See more at http://www.securitysa.com/55019n.)

Other changes to various XProtect versions include the introduction of failover and Smart Retrieve functionality into XProtect Expert. The next release, scheduled for September, will also see support for H.265, smart maps in Interconnect, fisheye dewarping as a standard within XProtect and no longer available as a plug-in, and support for IoT (Internet of Things) devices – among many other changes.

Other innovations include improvements to the autodetect and autodiscover functions which automatically find devices on the network and assign an IP address to them. And as noted, the SDK will also be in for a few improvements, as will Milestone’s mobile capabilities.

Partner presentations and awards

Interspersed with the Milestone presentations, a number of partners also delivered short presentations dealing with their collaboration with Milestone as well as the products they offer to the security, and specifically the video surveillance market. The first day saw presentations by Axis Communications, Promise Technology and Bosch, while the second day saw NetApp, Huawei and Hikvision taking the stage.

During the gala dinner, Milestone also presented a few awards. Some of these (Hi-Tech Security Solutions will expand on the awards in the next issue) include:

• Milestone Solution partner for 2015: Gallagher.

• Best Value Added Distributor 2016: ADI Global Distribution.

• Best Partner for 2015: Camsecure.

MPOP was an opportunity for all those in the Milestone community to interact, learn from each other and see where the company will be taking the world’s leading management platform over the next year. The presentations were well attended and informative, and the exhibition area had a regular flow of people talking and learning from the various exhibitors.

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