The Security.World community voted during the summer of 2017 and selected the Physical Security and Video Surveillance industry’s Top 12 Influencers. This Profile is one in the series of 12 of those individuals that are making a difference in our industry. Congratulations to Giorgio Bucci, President and Chairman of the Board of Directors of Arteco. We reached out to Giorgio to get his views and insight on what is happening in the physical security and video surveillance market.

The international Security.World community of physical security professionals has just selected you as one of their Top 12 industry Influencers for 2017. What is your reaction to that?

I am excited and honored to be part of such a distinguished group of individuals, all who have contributed greatly to our industry at large.

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

My family has been in the security industry since after World War II, when my grandfather Giovanni Bucci launched an Italian lock and key company named CISA. The company invented the first electro-lock, which enables users to open a remote door with a button and an impulse through an electrical cable. CISA grew exponentially, to the point that two other companies were funded by my father, Carlo Bucci, during his tenure at the organization: IEMCA, which is a leader in bar feeding equipment, and Arteco, which in 1989 started as a CNC company for axis movement in industrial machines. In 2003, Carlo saw an opportunity to move Arteco into the video surveillance space after developing a control solution that used video cameras as sensors. CISA was sold to Ingersoll Rand in 2001. In 2006, I took over Arteco with the idea to focus it on the more lucrative and less mature, at the time, video surveillance market.

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

I have seen many, many changes in the security industry. From a technology perspective, I have seen the industry moving from tape recorders to DVRs with analog cameras. Then, there was the transition from DVRs to NVRs, where the software component was the most valuable of the system. This was a challenging time for the industry and many companies who didn’t update their skills to move along with these changes lost business to those that embraced the benefit of software-defined solutions.

From an organizational view, the continued globalization of the market and the ever-growing number of overseas competitors has driven competition up to the highest levels we’ve seen in years. Now, every company has to put its best effort forward to be innovative and deliver value to its customers. At the same time, we need to be competitive from a pricing standpoint. It’s a tough balance but in the end, the consumer always wins.

What do you see has been the single most impactful technology in the industry?

Video event management software (VEMS) and data analytics have become the most crucial tools for video security systems. These components help our customers achieve a higher level of situational awareness than previously thought possible. These software solutions (not hardware) are helping facilities be more secure and further streamline operations while giving users more insights to make the most informed decisions possible.

In today’s evolving business environment, organizations must be able to quickly and easily identify risk. This process can be achieved via data- and analytic-driven results. Video event management software solutions are the outcome of digital video technology integrated with analytical software to extract actionable data from video surveillance while making applications including video surveillance, access control, intrusion detection, building automation, traffic control and parking management more intuitive and easier to use. Operators are empowered to leverage video that focuses on the details of an event to quickly identify security threats, enabling intelligent and informed security responses to be made in less time while saving money. Therefore, the future of user-friendly, cost-effective security lies in this type of technology and the event-driven intelligence it delivers.

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 the near future.

The future of the industry will be built on four key ideas: convergence, connectivity, communications and compatibility. Convergence and system and device compatibility are finally here. It was evident at any trade show you attended this year: IT companies exhibiting alongside physical security providers, integrated partner pavilions, and Big Data partnerships, and the cooperation between security and marketing within an enterprise. All these initiatives point to the fact that the industry is becoming integrated, customers are aligning within their organizations and ease of communication between third-party devices is more of a reality.

Tell us about a newer technology that you think is going to significantly alter the industry landscape.

We are very excited about the future of face recognition. And it all goes back to the idea that we as a technology innovator have to find new ways to deliver solutions that help customers find the more important data at the time they need it. Arteco recently added intelligent face recognition capabilities to its suite of video event management solutions to enhance data capture and awareness. Arteco Face Recognition is made possible through deep learning and 3D technology. It has the ability to manage millions of templates, making it scalable to fit a wide range of analytic requirements. Its powerful algorithms also address many frequent challenges users once faced when deploying analytics, such as subject pose, expression, environmental lighting and partial facial occlusions. We’re very excited about the advanced intelligence this solution brings to our customers and what new use cases we’ll see come out of future deployments.

What vertical market do you think is going to witness the biggest impact of industry advancements and why?

Vertical market opportunities are rich in the education, retail, critical infrastructure, logistics and Safe City markets, and as a company, we are focusing significant efforts on addressing the specific needs of customers in these sectors. In the education market, the stringent requirements and security challenges demand solutions that allow users to gain insight that facilitates a quick response and more informed decision-making. Retailers must address a number of needs to ensure customer satisfaction and maximize profits, while also protecting assets, employees and customers. Also, cities and first responders leverage video as a powerful tool to enhance situational awareness and gain new insights into potential risks.

Regardless of the use case, video event management solutions can help stakeholders evaluate security risks and business challenges in new ways by prioritizing resources around events of interest and leveraging open-platform integrations to gain new levels of intelligence that drive safe, secure operations.

What are your thoughts about technologies that may be intersecting with more individual/personal applications (i.e.: biometrics, cloud, IoT, wearables, etc.)?

Biometrics is of growing interest as are opportunities with cloud-based technologies. What I think is most interesting is that the demand for more intelligent data and more rapid access to this data is what is driving interest in these emerging technologies. The drive to help identify the “event” that is most critical to our customers is excatly what Arteco is built upon.