Lars Nordenlund Friis
VP Incubation and Ventures, Milestone Systems

Recently, SecurityHive?s Maurice Joseph had a chance to sit down with Milestone?s Lars Nordenlund Friis, the VP of Incubation and Ventures, for a one-on-one conversation about Milestone Husky and Milestone Arcus products. Milestone Arcus is a streamlined thin-client video surveillance platform designed to be embedded in hardware devices, enabling Milestone hardware technology partners to deliver customized, market-ready solutions. The innovative Milestone Husky Series is the result of challenging the convention and delivering a more powerful, all-in-one NVR solution with optimized processing power to meet the stringent demands of any surveillance environment.

Lars Nordenlund Friis was brought on board Milestone to head up the Incubation and Innovation team that was started about two years ago with the purpose of identifying new segment areas for growth in the industry for their partners and for Milestone – areas that are not currently a focus for Milestone, with the idea being to find new market segments, new partnerships, and new business models.

Nordenlund Friis spoke about the team he heads up at Milestone, the technologies his team is bringing to market, and even touched on other technologies such as the cloud. And also the Canon acquisition.

The incubation team?s mission is to round out great ideas with partnerships that can develop even more ideas and bring new research and development efforts to drive significant business for Milestone and their partners.

One of the first two projects that the Innovation Team started on was the Milestone Husky product series, which is an embedded NVR product – an area of the market that represents $2.4 billion. Milestone wanted to provide a solution to their partners with a completely integrated, fully embedded solution.

Another strategy to tap into this embedded market was a Linux oriented, entry level multi-platform product to create a partner platform: that became the Milestone Arcus solution. Milestone Arcus brings an embedded solution that Milestone partners can integrate into their products to deliver a unique solution offering.

SecurityHive posed the question to Mr. Nordenlund Friis about the Milestone Arcus product being a departure from the normal Windows-based Milestone software. ?Milestone took the Linux branch to deliver a strong high-performance platform for this market segment. Therefore, the Milestone Innovation team has two main projects in the embedded space with Milestone Husky as a Milestone-branded appliance solution and the partner-driven Milestone Arcus software solution,? he replied.

Nordenlund Friis was then asked about Milestone?s history being that of an open platform company and now with the Husky appliance, wouldn?t Milestone partners view this Milestone offering with hesitation, and how would Milestone maintain the ?open? balance?

?Good question,? replied Nordenlund Friis, ?Actually we see the appliance opening a new market segment with the analog-to-IP convergence and because a lot of the installed base of the analog market now looking for a higher quality, higher performing offering from the IP solution. As such, we think we are opening new segments that are not in conflict with anything else we are doing. What we are seeing today is that our existing channels are embracing this solution because it is easy to use, pre-installed, and pre-qualified by Milestone out of the box, so you don?t have to work so much on getting this solution up and running and you can move on to the next deal faster and more efficiently.?

Nordenlund Friis was then asked if he was seeing current Milestone partners adding value on top of these new offerings. He responded, ?Exactly, and that?s the second point. We are completely open with all our appliances – we support all the cameras, over 3,500 cameras, and all the add-on opportunities with our solution partners, and we integrate with our higher-end corporate solution through Milestone Interconnect. So we?ve made it easier because we?ve integrated and optimized the performance of the software with a hardware platform.”

SecurityHive asked what are some of the major environments for the Milestone Husky family? ?We have a three-point family lineup. We start with the Milestone Husky M10 as an entry level solution that is extremely easy to install and auto-detects all cameras; high quality components that create a truly plug-and-play solution with the Milestone software that fits into that space,? replied Mr. Nordenlund Friis. ?Then as you move to the Milestone Husky M30 you have an optimized workstation level solution for high-performance, high-quality, embedded with the Milestone VMS. The M50 is a highly scalable rack mount solution capable of larger storage that is optimized for larger environments.?

Moving the conversation to the Cloud, SecurityHive asked if such a debate now about cloud storage could be beneficial with so many pundits stating that cloud will transform the storage issues in the video surveillance industry.

Milestone?s Nordenlund Friis answered enthusiastically, ?I?m a true believer and I?ve seen it in the I.T. industry and I was a part of that in previous positions – how the cloud comes in and changes everything. In terms of business models, in terms of technologies, and I think it will do the same thing here in the video surveillance industry. It makes so much sense. You want centralized management in an updated infrastructure, if you can solve some of the technical barriers we have today such as bandwidth, compression, etc, with those solutions.?

He continued, ?I really see the video surveillance market being moved today from what we offer with Milestone Arcus, and Milestone Husky M10, and the edge recordings, and the distributed architecture, and that is the system we are investing into today. I believe we have a big future in the connected devices and it will move that into the cloud.?

?And that will essentially be a distributed system with a centralized management front-end that that will come over the next two to three years. I see the tipping points will be more fibre compression capabilities, in ways that we upload and download files at sensible price-points. Those tipping points will throw everything into consideration, for everyone to look at how to utilize the cloud. Then everything moves into the ?Internet of Things? so we start to get connected to more things. We have cloud-based access control, cloud-based centralized systems for cameras, and we start looking at verticals like retail. Then we have this big data system sitting in the cloud processing all the data power that could not be done before because all these devices were not inter-connected in local devices. This is super exciting and we look at how Milestone can play a role and be a part of that transformation.?

SecurityHive followed up with a question asking what Milestone saw as the ?security? issues of the cloud? ?This has always been a big question mark about the cloud. We now have all the financial data in the cloud, you have the customer data in the cloud, and these items will continue to evolve over time from the technologies. The security issues will come along with them,? stated Nordenlund Friis. ?But the main issues are bandwidth and adoption of the cloud in general, and you will see this trend over the next two to three years. I see this to be true in the U.S., Europe and in the mobile market like Africa.?

Changing the subject we asked —what we are sure is becoming an all-too-common question— how life at Milestone has changed since the Canon acquisition?

Nordenlund Friis, being a good sport replied, ?Not a lot actually! We have a very strong partnership with Canon and we make sure we integrate well with the Canon cameras —just as we do with other manufacturer partners— and we spend time with their team as partners. And now we are able to explore new markets and new opportunities with Milestone Husky as an example that they are interested to be integrated.?

SecurityHive followed up with what Milestone sees with Canon?s technology prowess being integrated into the Milestone team and how does he see this Canon relationship evolving over time?

?We learn from partnerships. We are very close and continue to learn from various camera manufacturers, as we have over the years, such as licensing matters with Axis in the very beginning, or working with Arecont Vision, with Hikvision, and others especially in the European market. As I?ve mentioned previously, I?m sure Canon investing heavily in the video surveillance industry will naturally move Canon up the partnership ladder. And we will surely learn more by working with them,? stated Nordenlund Friis.

He continued, ?We are excited about Canon?s history of innovation and their capabilities in this direction. Canon is the third largest patent holder in the world ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-14/ibm-wins-most-u-s-patents-for-21st-year-in-a-row ) and that speaks volumes to Milestone?s entrepreneurial spirit. As for the day-to-day operations, things really have not changed much since the acquisition. Canon acquired us with a stand-alone staff and here we are a year later and we are still our branded VMS company. We have been impressed with the quality of the Canon cameras, and they are looking to invest more into their product line. We are excited to be part of such a quality organization.?

Lars Nordenlund Friis has an MBA from Henley in London. Before joining Milestone Systems in September 2012, he had been Head of Strategy in Northern Europe for PwC, a partner at PA Consulting, and spent six years at Microsoft in Seattle leading their global ISV (Independent Software Vendor) business, as well as being responsible for global business development at Microsoft Partner Columbus IT and other technology companies.