International. Canon recently acquired BriefCam. Many suppliers of video surveillance equipment hope that the future the big difference in solutions will be based on software.
This is why there has been a relatively high number of acquisitions from security software vendors in recent years—Milestone, Aimetis, Cognimatics, ObjectVideo, Intellivision, SeeTec, Exacq Technology and Smartvue are just a few examples. Acquisition of Canon's BriefCam is the last resort.
Canon also acquired Milestone and Axis Communications. Similar to those acquisitions, Canon plans to operate BriefCam as an independent company within the group. However, Canon has the option to merge the companies at some point in the future if it so wishes.
The video surveillance supply base remains highly fragmented, with the 15 largest vendors accounting for about 58 percent of revenue and hundreds of other vendors accounting for the rest. If the supply base consolidates, Canon could choose to merge its acquisitions to create a large supplier of complete systems.
For BriefCam, your purchase by Canon gives you access to the resources of a much larger company. It could also help BriefCam grow its business in Canon's large domestic market in Japan and in the European markets of Axis and Milestone.
BriefCam will bring a number of analytical capabilities that will join Canon's existing offering algorithms offered by Citilog and Cognimatics, under the Axis brand, including city surveillance, traffic analytics, crowd monitoring and business intelligence analytics.
In addition, BriefCam's Video Synopsis analytics offering provides video search and summary capabilities that have been in development for several years. However, and perhaps more importantly, the acquisition of BriefCam will allow Canon to enter the "deep learning" market. Deep learning is a technology in which the Canon group seems to be lagging behind other teams such as Hikvision, Dahua and Avigilon.
There has been much debate about the use of artificial intelligence (AI) within the video surveillance market and the expected impact that this technology will have in the future. But BriefCam, in partnership with Nvidia, has developed several iterations of its Video Synopsis offering and is expected to continue developing this technology in the future.
