Canon's new company to harness the cloud

LONDON—Canon announced on June 27 a new business based in California called ARCUS Global Inc. Owned by Canon Europe and built on the intellectual property, technology and expertise of Canon Group company Milestone Systems, ARCUS Global Inc. will address the significant unmet global market demand from large enterprises for 'Video Cloud IoT as a Service' for security and business optimization.

“We are excited to launch our new company ... and to introduce Video Cloud IoT as a Service not currently offered to the global enterprise market,” Lars Nordenlund Friis, CEO of ARCUS Global Inc., said in the announcement. “We have a clear competitive advantage by drawing on the strengths of Milestone Systems and partnering with global leaders in public cloud infrastructure and IT technology.”

Lars Thinggaard, president & CEO, Milestone Systems, said in the announcement, “We are proud to deliver the technology and know-how that ARCUS Global Inc. will use as their foundation. The spin-off allows us to continue to grow Milestone's leadership position within on premise and private cloud video management solutions, where we continue to increase our investments.”

Currently, ARCUS Global Inc. has 20 employees, and “we will be ramping up to 100-plus within the next three years,” Nordenlund Friis told Security Systems News, noting that he sees major opportunities for the company and for customers leveraging cloud-based solutions.

“We see this market coming together right now for rapid growth, which is why we launched this venture,” he said. “We see a strong trend at the moment moving toward 'video as a service' and being able to scale up global solutions in a very distributed manner with the cloud infrastructure on the back end as well as providing analytics and more business insights and security on top of that.”

As a spin-off from an already established business like Milestone, “we want to build out a complete global infrastructure for cloud-enabled solutions,” Nordenlund Friis said. “The next phase is launching an early adopter program with key enterprise customers that consider cloud as a way forward for their security and business insight models.”

Key verticals that are more “cloud ready,” he said, include retail, hospitality, transportation and law enforcement, as well as the mobile-enabled IoT space. “We see a big demand in all three regions right now but definitely North America is going to be a priority for us.”

The new company will target a growing global cloud video management services market.

“We have identified Network Visual Solutions (NVS) as a key pillar of Canon's future growth and have already made important steps in this space including the acquisitions of Milestone Systems and Axis Communications,” Rokus van Iperen, president & CEO, Canon Europe, Middle East & Africa, said in the announcement. “Our investment in ARCUS Global Inc. is the latest demonstration of our commitment and strategy to strengthen our position in this rapidly developing market.”