The SecurityHive.com community voted during the summer of 2014 and selected the Physical Security and Video Surveillance industry’s Top 12 Influencers. – This Profile is one in the series of 12 making a difference in our industry

As the Global Lead for the justice and public safety (JPS) market segment, Hong-Eng Koh leads Oracle’s global JPS strategy, initiatives, and activities. He serves as Oracle’s JPS expert, offering thought leadership on global JPS trends and challenges, best practices, and technological implementations, and he facilitates the development and adoption of solutions for JPS customers, through Oracle’s broad range of technology, applications, and hardware products, as well as third-party products.

A community of over 8000 industry professionals has just selected you as one of the Top 12 industry Influencers for 2014. What is your reaction to that?

It was like “wow”! It’s a pleasant surprise and great honor to be voted as one of the Top 12 Influencers. The honor should not be just mine. It belongs to the global team of few other subject matter experts I lead in Oracle, including former head of police intelligence, prosecutor, justice CIO and public safety CIO.

How long have you been active in the physical security/video surveillance industry and what brought you into this industry?

I started focusing on this space since graduation. Not just physical security/video surveillance, but 24 years of public safety, law enforcement, intelligence, safe city, homeland security, immigration, border control, emergency management, judiciary, prisons, etc. It was a very exciting journey witnessing many changes in the industry, including evolving behavior by the bad guys too!

How did you get started (what was your first job) in this industry?

I was awarded a scholarship by the Singapore Police Force and started my police career upon graduation in 1990. I took on various postings including criminal investigation, community policing, public affairs, operations, head of computer systems, and commander (reserved) of airport police. I joined Oracle through the acquisition of Sun Microsystems, where I also led the Justice & Public Safety business. Both companies offered me nearly 15 years of experience in the global Justice & Public Safety market.

What are some of the changes in the industry that you saw coming and are most proud about being accurate?

More than a decade ago, video surveillance (both monitoring and storage) was very much localized due to the high costs of storage and networking, and storage was typically between 2-4 weeks.

In both engagements, safe city implementation has to include fusion and analysis of multiple data feeds, such as video, other sensors and even social media.

Expecting such costs to reduce as technology advances, we started to focus on enterprise video surveillance architecture with localized and centralized monitoring, localized primary storage (high resolution), centralized secondary storage (low resolution), and even longer-term archival using tape library. I am glad this is commonly adopted now and we support it through Oracle Information Life-cycle Management.

In the beginning of the 21st century, safe city projects around the globe equate to “CCTV”. Having done frontline policing work before, I knew this was not right, especially since back then video surveillance was used mainly for forensic purposes, more to help solve a crime/incident.

For a city to be safe, we need to focus more on the prevention and detection aspects. It has to be a fusion approach where video feed is one of the many sources of data, and we need multiple analytics, including video analytics.

In the past two years, I was on the panel of experts of Singapore’s National Research Foundation’s Global Safe & Secure City Initiative and an advisor to Singapore’s Safety & Security Industry Programme. In both engagements, safe city implementation has to include fusion and analysis of multiple data feeds, such as video, other sensors and even social media. Oracle supports such safe city initiative through our Intelligence Hub & Alerts solution, comprising Big Data Appliance, Oracle Event Processing, Master Data Management, Semantic Analysis and Endeca Information Discovery.

How have you seen the industry change over the past few years?

It all started with CCTV, or analogue cameras, running on proprietary coaxial cable and video cassette recorder. Due to past investments on analogue system, digital system was introduced gradually, resulting in hybrid systems and in many cases stovepipe systems not giving a full security picture. As technology advances and cost reduces, more digital cameras over IP network were installed, and storage over network video recorder and even generic data storage (e.g. NAS, SAN and tape library). With the need to tap on video surveillance beyond forensic, increasing number of companies started offering intelligent video analytics. But frequent false positives held back such analytics deployment, mainly because of poor video quality, lighting condition, camera placement and noises.Moving forward, the trend will be on data fusion, and even Big Data, like I described earlier on safe city. And the digital camera will evolve to become truly Internet of Things, as in audio and even odor sensors within the camera. This makes sense since the existing IP network connected to the camera can be used by these sensors.

What do you see has been the single most impactful technology in the industry?
The move from analogue to digital is definitely the single most impactful technology. It opens up so many possibilities; from more cost-efficient information life cycle management, to intelligent video analytics, to data fusion, to workflow automation, etc. Traditionally physical security and video surveillance systems are procured and managed by departments other than the IT department in an organization. Despite the global trend towards digitization, I am concerned that organizations are still slow in moving such function to IT department.

As an industry influencer, can you share with us a business success story or case study that you are most proud about?
In 1996, as the head of computer systems in Singapore Police Force, I had the privilege to lead the first video analytic project. We built a nation wide VOI (vehicle of interest) database system that was connected to an ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) system at the border checkpoint. It was such a new technology then that we spent a long time on the evaluation, including proof of concept by all bidders; testing different lighting conditions, number plate positions, vehicle speed, weather conditions, etc. The ROI was great, we had many positive hits and contributed to the public safety of Singapore.The second case is more recent: Turkey’s Izmir City Security Management System. It’s an integrated command and control system for a city with 4 million residents; involving 2 data centers, clustered redundancy, 560 cameras, 155km of cables and 402 TB storage. The system supports 11,000 active security staff, located in 35 police stations and 300 police cars, through Oracle portal technologies. Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies are used to integrate ANPR, video analytics, automatic vehicle location, command and control software, geographical information system, etc. Such Oracle-based Service Oriented Architecture even allows real-time consumption of TCP messages from sensors, such as ANPR and compare them against VOI database, and send positive hits to the command and control software. The entire solution includes 300 pre-determined threat events, ranging from public disorder, terror attack, pollution, and disaster. Using Oracle Business Process Management, a detected threat event is transformed to actual deployment of resources and action plans. Today we have all these features as our Intelligent Video Surveillance & Management solution.

Please share with us your visions of this industry and what it will look like for manufacturers, integrators, installers, central stations, and end-users in:
Although we have different AV compression standards such as H.264 and MPEG-4, I envisage (and I sure hope!) formal interoperable standards to allow plug-and-play of different brands of cameras (fixed and mobile), video management system, analytics software, storage, etc. And that will pave the way for a wide-spread adoption of cloud-based intelligent video surveillance, analytics and archival services, for both consumers and enterprises, including government security agencies.

Tell us about a current industry FAD or trend that you do _not_ see being around in the future (i.e.: NFC, gesture technology for access control, body worn cameras, patient biometric authentication, etc)
For years, many camera providers have been researching on in-camera video analytics. With the lower cost of high speed networking, which was a driving force for such in-camera features, such trend may not last long. Basic video analytics such as motion detection and tripwire will remain in-camera. But advanced video analytics cannot be just COTS product features; in many cases they have to be a Systems Integrator project involving customization of video analytics, and fusion with other data sources like what I described earlier.

Environment recognition analytics (different from facial recognition) is going to be significant.

Tell us about a newer technology that you think is going to significantly alter the industry landscape:
With exponential growth in smart devices, wearable technologies and drones, we are probably seeing more video recording devices than traditional fixed security cameras. Many of the security cameras did not capture the faces of the two terrorists at the Boston Marathon attack. The faces were captured by members of the public. As part of safe city implementation I spoke earlier, it will be about data fusion including video and media coming from different sources. Environment recognition analytics (different from facial recognition) is going to be significant. With big data, we need such analytics to automatically sort the media/video by location/environment. For example, all the photos and videos taken at the marathon finishing line from a certain angle. Or all the photos taken in a pub by different people before a fight took place.

What vertical market do you think is going to witness the biggest impact of industry advancements and why? (Airports, Seaports, Campus (K12/Univ), Hospitals, Law Enforcement, Banking, Oil/Gas, Retail, etc)
Counter terrorism, riots and even mass shooting will surely attract more investment, and more R&D. These are the vertical markets to watch for.

What are your thoughts on laws or legislation that are currently being considered or do you think may be forthcoming that will have an impact on the industry: ( i.e: Banning of LPR cameras for police, cruise lines to requiring shipboard video surveillance, schools banned from collecting biometric data on students, etc)
Privacy issues are always at the forefront in this industry.

What is your position on where the privacy line is located today and where you see that line in the future and do you agree with those positions?
Indeed, there are concerns over privacy and security. As a nation develops, there will be increasing concerns over privacy infringements. Police and the government have to protect the privacy of their constituents. Laws, policies, governance, compliance and audit trail have to be in place allowing constituents to maintain their privacy. A law-abiding citizen should not be afraid. However, in this world of cyber-facilitated crimes (e.g. pedophiles grooming victims through social networking, terrorists recruiting and enabling online), proper judicial process needs to be in place for police/intelligence agencies to access to some of these usually privacy-protected data sources. Strict governance and audit trail are needed to prevent and detect abuses. There is also a need for separation of duties. For example, United Kingdom has a National ANPR Data Centre; law enforcement/intelligence agencies follow strict guidelines on the use of such data.As for OSINT, if a person does not shy away posting on social networking site publicly, he/she needs to understand that anyone, including marketing companies, government agencies and even criminals, can view such contents without his/her permission. Furthermore, Internet never forgets, although the owner can delete contents, they are likely to be mirrored, re-posted, and even downloaded. In recent years, some countries have started passing legislation on “right to be forgotten”. Lastly, it is important to realize that one cannot uphold privacy without security. All the laws and policies point to the need for information security, such as the strong Security Inside Out offerings by Oracle, including infrastructure security, identity management, GRC (Government, Risk & Compliance), cloud security and mobile security.

What are your thoughts about technologies that may be intersecting with more individual/personal applications (i.e.: cloud, IoT, wearables, etc.)?
It seems that ecosystems for physical security are expanding rapidly and are requiring deeper integration with different types of partners, providing new market opportunities.

How can the industry support or accelerate these synergistic partnership opportunities?
Definitely! One should always start with the end in mind. We should not be talking only about product features, be it megapixel camera or video analytics, but also the operational capabilities we hope to achieve. And that is always about fusion and ecosystem. This is why my Global Justice & Public Safety Team in Oracle is driving such ecosystem through our Intelligent Video Surveillance & Management solution, including partners (e.g. smart camera, video management, video analytics, networking) and Oracle (e.g. mobility, engineered systems, big data analytics, messaging bus, portal, security, storage, tape library). The industry has seen a significant increase in the merger and acquisition activity lately.

What M&A activity do you think has been significant and what do you see happening with companies in the near future?

Surely M&A will continue as part of the industry consolidation, especially in line with the different trends I spoke about, be it cloud-based services or ecosystems.

Is there anything in the “lab” that you’re currently working on or involved with that you would like to share with our readership?
Last year, Oracle’s President, Mark Hurd, announced that we spent $5 billion on R&D across multiple areas including product development in cloud, applications, and vertical integration. We also focus lots on industries and design many industry-based solutions, some of which I mentioned earlier. Join us at our annual Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco to learn more!

Who do you look to as an industry influencer? Who or what are some resources that you follow?
I am big into social networking. The different platforms I am subscribed to are providing me relevant targeted information. And, of course, SecurityHive.com 😉

Please provide any other feedback or comments you wish our readers to know about you or your position in the industry.
Once again, it’s a great honor to be voted as world’s Top 12 influencers. I hope to continuously contribute back to the society in making our environments safer and more secure. Connect me in LinkedIn and follow me in Twitter (@he_koh).