The mistake of middle sized companies in Videoanalytics

Video Analytics in modern world is widely associated with security solutions, like facial recognition, people behaviour analytics and so on.

But thats not just true, and that is one of the cause why many not only small but big companies are facing with problems to expand their business and provide stable company growth.

Firs of all, you might know that there's a lot of different camera equipment manufactures that play on this field. Like huge China players (apparently they been banned in some countries or industries) - like Hikvision, Dahua ad some others. Or Some well-known brands like Axis, Bosch, or Wisenet.

All this camera vendors are developing their own software, so called VMS, its a sort of operational system to operate videostreams from cameras. And then they try to top-up this with either build-inn analytics on cameras or different modules that runs on a servers where VMS is located. But the main goal for this big camera vendors is to sell their equipment. They don't have enough interest or manpower to run big RND sites in software development for that. It's basically box-moving story. Vendors don't care about projects - they dont deal directly with customers, they run their business through distributors! So they dont' care much if their software part is good or bad. And the customer takes it "as is". Like OK - this camera is not recognising car licence plates properly, so what could I do? Budgets spent on camera, distributor work and so on. And the result is not always satisfying (most commonly).

And on another side of this industry we have some software vendors who are trying to focus on developing their VMS and integrate existed video analytic modules or develop their own. This company usually don't have much chance to penetrate equipment production market, or, if they are - are not able to compete with big equipment manufactures. So they are acting as a independent software vendors, providing interoperability through variety of camera vendors and giving flexibility to customer projects. But they prefer to act through system integrators and trying to make system integrators to play the same role as distributors for equipment vendors.
This no dispute allow them to catch some project and run competitions in between companies in the same niche. But it is almost impossible to grow business this way.

The only proper way is to combine abilities and sales force of big camera manufactures (and their sales network through distributors) with power and expertise of software vendors and their approach to custom designed software solutions. In this case its a win-win situation. I think we will see some M&A in upcoming 1-2 year.