by David McGuinness, Gary Myers and Edward Troha
Optimism. It was encouraging to hear manufacturers, integrators, a few end-users/customers and even industry analysts talking about positive plans and expectations for the year. The adoption rate for IP solutions is gaining speed. Although 2009 was a year of recession, IP video still grew in the 20-25% range and the promotion of IP was clearly the headline from big traditional players such as Pelco and Tyco. Major manufacturers spoke about more new IP and analytics-enabled products in the 2010 pipeline. Good for our industry.
Walking around, it is always interesting to see what companies are doing to draw people into their booths. Outside of the obvious, there was a car giveaway, a “game-show” which faced off attendees to see who could install an alarm panel first, former NFL players signing autographs, a Kindle giveaway, and quite a few soon-to-be-released iPad giveaways. Overall, the traffic at the show seemed to be pretty good and these approaches did draw in the people for at least a look-see. It was easy to get sucked into the booth run by a local company (non-industry) that was doing golf club fitting. They had a golf net and launch monitor with lots of clubs to try out… a certain OV golf nut came very close to going home with a new driver!
Even though there were fewer exhibitors this year, ISC West was as busy as ever. Thinking Friday would be quiet all day, it turned out traffic didn’t thin until about 12:30. Keeping with the ”intelligent ingredient” theme, ObjectVideo demos of several varieties were hosted by a number of solution partners, including Pelco, Genetec and DIGIOP. In addition, it’s encouraging to see the growing opportunities the combination of ObjectVideo and Intel technologies brings to the security and business intelligence markets. Analytics is not the solution, it just helps to bring much greater value to the solution.