Eagle Eye debuts 'modern, open' API

AUSTIN, Texas—Cloud-based VMS provider Eagle Eye Networks on May 27 announced the launch of its Eagle Eye Video API, which CEO Dean Drako hopes will be used to “develop lots of applications that are not security-based.”
 
Eagle Eye Networks is a new company, launched in January by Drako, who founded Barracuda Networks in 2003.

Eagle Eye's VMS features intelligent bandwidth management, privacy encryption, and supports IP and analog cameras. Drako said the video is highly available and highly secure, noting that all video is stored three times—or in three different locations. Users choose how much video is stored on site and in the cloud.

Integrators pay a per-camera fee to Eagle Eye; integrators then decide how to structure service plans and fees for their end users. The integrator uses a portal or master console to see the status of their end users' systems.

The new Eagle Eye Video API provides “a set of storage, analytics, indexing and interfaces for quickly building or integrating [simple or complex] applications with both live and recorded video,” according to Eagle Eye.

Drako likened the Eagle Eye API's baked-in infrastructure to “Twilio, which allows [developers] to easily incorporate voice, VoIP and SMS.”

To create integrations with traditional VMS systems is a lengthy process, he said, involving several steps, including setting up equipment, getting approvals from manufacturers and lots of man power.

And programming traditionally has to be done in Windows, he said. This is not the case with Eagle Eye's API because,  “modern programmers don't want to program in Windows anymore,” Drako said.

With Eagle Eye's API, “all the hard work is already done,” Drako said. He called this API “modern” and “open” and said it differs from the typical APIs in the physical security industry, which he said are not open to the public and require NDAs.
 
Drako said the platform was created to enable a lot of people to build a lot of different applications. He pointed out that this API could—and should—be used to build an application with a competitor's VMS. Eagle Eye welcomes that kind of innovation, he said.

Drako's “personal goal” is that developers and integrators come up with many non-security-based applications. From his point of view, the security integrator is in a great position to benefit from the availability of non-security-based applications.

“They are the ones that know how to install the cameras, make them work, keep them working,” he said. With more applications for those cameras, integrators will thrive and transition from “security integrators to video integrators,” Drako predicted.

Eagle Eye is currently working with a couple dozen integrators, one of whom is David Manento, president of Royal Security Services, based in Saylorsburg, Pa. Manento said he's used Eagle Eye's VMS in a few installations and has been particularly pleased that it works “on any web browser… and all platforms.”  

Manento has used his PC, iPhone, iPad, and Android Tablet with Eagle Eye. “Within a minute, I can login, see my accounts, see their status … if they're up and running and if any cameras are down,” he explained.

Manento has not yet used the new API, but said he would be interested in video analytics applications such as traffic flow and people counting. He's used these kinds of analytics in the past, but said “with the hardware and software and time involved, it's quite costly.” He can foresee how similar applications via the API would be “”less costly and easier for us and the end user to use.”