'Surveillance is No Longer Just a Matter of Passively Monitoring what's Happening'

1. Doesn't the use of local SD cards in the cameras act as a space limitation for an intensive task such as surveillance?

On the face of it, yes it does, but if you look at the on-going developments, surveillance is no longer just a matter of passively monitoring events. You may have over a dozen cameras even in a small retail store, but you may not have the resources to have people constantly monitoring them, especially if you are an SME. In fact, your need to monitor may not be 24x7. For instance, you would need to record something only when motion is detected by the camera and not otherwise. This brings down the storage requirements. Thus, there is a need to have local storage for analytics purpose

s, within the camera itself in order to avoid having a central storage setup which can otherwise become a single point of failure. And anyway the SD cards available in the market are growing in capacity now over time.

2. Can the Axis Camera Companion be made to work with existing cameras? What would be the limitation if an organization wants to be free to put to use their existing inventory of cameras (or for that matter yet to be purchased cameras of their own choice?)

Our product requires that the camera's firmware be of a specific version in order to be compatible. As long as the camera's firmware is of the version required, ACC will be compatible and can be deployed in minutes, although of course physical installation of the cameras will take some time. In comparison, if you take our solution where we provide the IP cameras, these cameras operate on Power-over-Ethernet, hence do not require any rewiring of the power supply lines in the premises.

3. Why don't you offer Surveillance-as-a-Service?

Yes, we are yet to roll that out in Asia, but we do offer the same in US and UK

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4. What are the factors that an SMB would need to take into account before going for a video surveillance solution?

There are three key considerations: lighting conditions at the point of monitoring, a precise understanding of what needs to be recorded and the kind of analytics that is needed on the recorded footage.