With an expanding urban population and fast urbanisation, smart city initiatives are gaining appeal throughout the world. Stakeholders are seeking more efficient methods to manage complexity, boost efficiency, and improve quality of life. This has generated a need for cities to monitor and integrate infrastructure in order to better manage resources while providing the best services to their residents.
Since the inception of this program, Videonetics is playing a pivotal role by providing its unified video computing platform, especially developed to address typical challenges with regards to large-scale surveillance, traffic management, and video forensics, etc. It has successfully achieved the market leadership position in the safe and smart city market in India by successfully securing 140 cities in India.
The modular architecture of UVCP™ makes it efficient to integrate various applications using pluggable modules and customize the solution to meet the unique needs of many industries ranging from small shops to universities, stadiums, and cities.
In an exclusive interview with Insights Success, Dr Tinku Acharya, who has worked in technology leadership positions across industries in the US and India. He sheds some light on the smart city initiatives and expresses about Videonetics and its operations. With such an enriched experience, he has guided and supervised numerous graduate and doctoral students.
Let us dive into the interview given below:
Describe Videonetics in detail.
We are the world’s first company to develop AI and DL powered unified video computing platform (UVCP™), which has been magnificently managing video data as well as other sensor-generated multi-sensory data in a single unified framework.
Videonetics UVCP™ has been trained with very large and diverse datasets, making it incredibly robust, smart, and computationally efficient. It encompasses Intelligent VMS, Video Analytics, Intelligent Traffic Management System, Facial Recognition, Video Computing Platform as a Service (VCPaaS™), and Video Command Control Centre.
We have been ranked as the number one VMS provider in India and amongst the top five in Asia (IHS/ Informa Tech Research 2019). Acclaimed as a market leader, Videonetics has secured more than 140 cities, 80+ airports, 100+ large enterprises, and monitoring 15K traffic lanes across many geographies.
What is the USP of Videonetics, and how is it different from others?
The key to our success has been our uniqueness of the platform, local solutions for local problems, ‘truly’ open platform, technology-neutral, and willingness to undertake challenges to resolve specific issues by providing customized solutions combined with world-class after-sales service to our partners and end customers.
Our technology has achieved patents from countries like Israel, the UK, the USA, Singapore, Canada, India, and so on.
How was your firm/business affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and what measures did you take to shorten the damages while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees?
The COVID-19 global pandemic had a life-changing impact on all of us in the last two years, including a multi-faceted jolt on the video surveillance industry. The influence of COVID-19 on companies and economies is changing the way businesses are run and provided throughout the world. Despite COVID-related restrictions and their impact on the global economy, Videonetics has maintained a positive momentum and never stopped innovation.
We became the world’s first company to launch AI-powered video analytics-based Pandemic Management Suite ‘SAJAG’ to empower COVID-19 warriors, crusaders, and law enforcement by delivering actionable intelligence with in-depth insights to combat the spread of the COVID-19.
Business continuity and the health of our employees, partners, and customers are our primary concerns. During this time, we are focused on supporting our partners and customers as much as we can. They are the extended arms of the company; we ensure to sustain their trust and confidence with us and continuing business with them throughout this unprecedented time and well into the future.
What are the security trends that Videonetics is observing in India at present?
This unprecedented outbreak has put every sector on the planet to the test as governments struggle to contain the virus. As the globe begins to vaccinate against COVID-19, the public and private sectors will stay alert in 2021 for protocol adherence. However, security concerns continue to be a significant motivator for end customers to spend on security, independent of vertical or even pandemic. And, in order to overcome these difficulties, the following major developments will emerge in 2021:
- Artificial Intelligence Based Solutions: Artificial intelligence-based solutions are still popular and will have a significant impact on the security sector. AI is making it conceivable for industries to occupy with actionable intelligence, as well as delivering security departments with data to spot potential issues or threats before they arise. In addition, they empower security operators or law enforcement agencies with forensics tools during the investigation process for making an informed decision.
- A Significant Focus on Cybersecurity: Today’s cyber-attacks are smarter and more advanced than ever, so developing cyber-resilient protection systems is no longer an option but an imperative. We at Videonetics are deeply focused on ‘Highly Secured’ offerings and have rooted cybersecurity in our development at the very beginning of any product.
- Moving to Cloud: In recent times, customers have started adopting cloud-based video surveillance due to its various benefits such as major cost savings, heightened data security, remote access, and maintenance, flexible storage and retention, scalability, increased stability, and disaster recovery. Many of the huge enterprises and, in fact, even the government are now embracing the ‘Cloud First’ policy, and most of their business procedures are already using the advantages of Cloud these days.
- User and Privacy Concerns: With AI obtaining momentums, how data is utilized and guarded will remain a major concern. Now, citizens are progressively concerned with the confidentiality of their data. Since most physical security applications involve the collection of video and data about people and assets, privacy regulations will continue to have a significant impact on the industry well into the future.
- Business Continuity: The risks to business continuity are continuous and severe for physical security systems, particularly video and access control, which are vulnerable to environmental disasters or terrorist attacks. The inspection systems should come with a built-in disaster recovery function so that users can take benefit of constant and uninterrupted checking of devices and events. This protects vital information and ensures business continuity, even when servers fail.
Where do you see Videonetics in the future?
Being in the industry for more than thirteen years, we have built its strong heritage of innovation and leadership in the visual computing platform. We will continue to innovate and generate Indian Intellectual Properties to provide innovative products to customers located in various parts of the world, eventually addressing their security and safety concerns along with optimizing business operations. Moreover, we have also started expanding our footprints in Southeast Asia, Middle East, the US, and UK markets by delivering and deploying solutions for various verticals.
Proficient Leader
Videonetics was founded by Dr Tinku Acharya, an IEEE fellow, internationally acclaimed scientist, inventor, and entrepreneur, with a mission to develop an unparalleled video computing platform. He is enriched with Intellectual Property portfolio and delivers pioneering products worldwide, to solve real-life challenges and problems.
Dr Acharya contributed to more than 160 US and International patents in various technology domains such as visual computing architectures, electronic imaging, data compression, multimedia computing, computer vision, intelligent video, VLSI architectures and algorithms, and so on. He has contributed to over 200 technical papers published in reviewed international journals, conferences, and book chapters.
He was elevated to ‘Fellow of IEEE’ in 2010 for his ‘contributions to the advancement of very-large-scale integration algorithms and architectures for electronic image processing’. He received the ‘Outstanding Engineer’ award from IEEE Southwest Region, USA, and the ‘Engineer of the Year’ award from IEEE Phoenix, USA, in 2008. He was identified as the ‘Most Prolific Inventor’ in Intel (worldwide) in 1999 and 2001, and in Intel Arizona, USA site for five consecutive years (1997-2001). He is a recipient of the ‘2009 NASI – Reliance Platinum Jubilee Award for innovation in Physical Sciences’ from the National Academy of Science in India and the ‘first innovator’ to receive this prestigious award.
