As Co-Founder and CEO, Mike runs the day-to-day operations of Solink while managing strategic relationships with partners and integrators. Mike is an expert in creating value for customers in data intensive industries. His years of experience working in data analysis and value creation have helped shape the overall direction of the Solink platform.
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?
I’m very honored by the recognition and excited to see that the industry is paying attention to what Solink is doing. It’s a great time to be in the security industry and I’m happy to be part of it.
How long have you been active in the physical security/video surveillance industry and what brought you into this industry?
I’m relatively new to the industry, but I have spent my entire career working on how to create a “story” from raw data. I think there’s no better opportunity to explain that story than through video – it adds an element of “context” that other textual sources of data do not measure. The challenge of working with video is what attracted me to the physical security and video surveillance industries – there is such a massive untapped opportunity to increase the utilization of video.
How did you get started (what was your first job) in this industry?
As I previously mentioned, I entered the security industry when I joined Solink. I started my career started at Bell Canada where I focused on collecting data from training, sales, performance, labour, cost, usage, pricing, or ANY data source to explain to management what we were doing right and where we could exploit opportunities. It was the business equivalent of “Moneyball” at Canada’s largest telecom company and I was the quant. In essence, this is what we are doing now at Solink, analyzing the raw data available inside a bank, a retail store and empowering remote and internal employees to make informed decisions.
What are some of the changes in the industry that you saw coming and are most proud about being accurate?
The biggest change – and the one I’m most excited about, is that end-users look to video to solve business problems outside of security. Companies that are leveraging video data sources to solve operations, marketing or logistic decisions are always on my radar. We are also very happy to see partners start collecting all kinds of data on the network – from POS to ATM to Access Control to, the marriage of transactional data to video is becoming mainstream in applications.
There is an impending convergence of the Big Data and Physical Security worlds and this will result in more acquisitions from both security and Big Data companies.
As an industry influencer, can you share with us a business success story or case study that you are most proud about?
I’m most proud of our work with Axcess Financial since the results we achieved with them and our partnership has helped define what Solink is all about. They have a very pragmatic team that was willing to change their process in an effort to reduce bad debt – their objective function. We leveraged the existing infrastructure, which was already collecting large amounts of data, and used it to prioritize how they conduct investigations and audits. We saw a real changes in the way they perform investigations, the amount of time it takes and most importantly the losses they were able to prevent from internal fraud.
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 five years, 10 years:
We see an important “managed service” function evolving where integrators and central stations are able to consume and leverage applications that empower customers. Today, service providers manage infrastructure health & up-time bound to an SLA. We see an opportunity to enhance that offering to encompass data mining and increasing awareness of the data collected in the managed infrastructure. We also feel that the increased use of surveillance video for more than just security applications will increase the market opportunity for everyone.
Tell us about a newer technology that you think is going to significantly alter the industry landscape:
Cloud or hosted infrastructure will continue to increase the flexibility that IT departments have, which will, in turn, increase the speed and scalability to get projects deployed. Security data is one of the largest forms of “dark data” (see Gartner definition) – data that is collected and used primarily for audit/compliance purposes, making it difficult (and less important) to transport across limited enterprise networks. As security information begins to optimize operational activities this will increase the availability of bandwidth (either by new infrastructure of increased priority). Moreover, by enabling an ecosystem of data, there is an opportunity for 3rd party applications and app developers to add value to the base of data for various use-cases. Similar to how the App Store is a gateway for app developers to add value to Apple’s mobile devices, enterprise data can be improved if it is opened to additional applications.
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)
The markets that will witness the biggest impact of industry advancements, specifically in data analytics, will be the ones that have the incentive to optimize value and have less stringent regulations. The simple reason is that having more freedom and flexibility allows companies to experiment and adopt new technology. In our case, retail has both the willingness and flexibility to invest in applications that will drive operational efficiency.
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?
Privacy concerns are an indication that people not only care about what happens to their information, but they also want to actively be part of the conversation as companies continue to leverage data analytics. Ignoring customers’ concerns and opinions is very risky for any company.
We respect and share the requirements of the evolving security & privacy concerns. We adopt the highest standards of security and authentication.
What are your thoughts about technologies that may be intersecting with more individual/personal applications (i.e.: cloud, IoT, wearables, etc.)?
We collect as much data as we can in order to understand and make informed decisions. In much the same way, wearable technology has the potential to help us understand how people interact with devices and the sensory data that can be collected.
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?
Unfortunately, many manufacturers create closed systems, they don’t spend enough time managing the partnership ecosystem through SDKs and APIs.
There needs to be industry-wide standards that allow these things to happen, otherwise little will change. Vendors also play a very important role in accelerating these partnerships. Unfortunately, many manufacturers create closed systems, they don’t spend enough time managing the partnership ecosystem through SDKs and APIs. We are very happy to be working with partners that care about this. When you create an application that integrates with other systems, you are adding “sticky-ness” and value beyond what your company alone can provide. That’s a very powerful thing.
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?
In terms of M&As I expect that, in the future, more data players will take notice of the physical security world. I would even go as far to say that leading companies that currently cater to physical security will emerge to be dominant players in technology. There is an impending convergence of the Big Data and Physical Security worlds and this will result in more acquisitions from both security and Big Data companies. Each will acquire complementary technologies to improve and extend the data and insight they are able to provide.
Google is a great example of a company that is looking to the security industry to increase the various forms of data they are using in order to improve their services. Just recently they acquired Nest and Dropcam.
Is there anything in the “lab” that you’re currently working on or involved with that you would like to share with our readership?
Something that has been on our minds lately is taking data inside the enterprise and pairing it with publicly accessible data outside the enterprise. This opens up the possibility to understand how social data can correlate to offline “context” rich data like CCTV, sensors, POS, etc.
Who do look to as an industry influencer? Who or what are some resources that you follow?
We like to follow emerging companies to learn what innovations are on the brink of commercialization, it helps expand our realm of possibility.