Verkada: Better Together

DENVER — VerkadaOne has followed up on its inaugural show in a big way, attracting 1,600 guests to the customer event and exceeding expectations. 

Those customers gathered at the Colorado Convention Center in downtown Denver to see what’s next for the physical security company and its suite of offerings. They wouldn’t be disappointed, either, as the company debuted its next generation of security cameras and access control systems, along with its AI-powered Alerts and a wealth of upgrades and additions to its Command Platform. 

One of those changes has gone a long way toward supporting Verkada's goals of integrating other hardware into its platform: Adopting the ONVIF open standard. The result is a system that is easier to deploy and integrate and appeals to large enterprises.  

“We think our platform is really suited for that,” said Brandon Davito, Verkada’s senior vice president of product and operations.

Davito says Verkada also wants to ensure, with security companies moving toward single pane of glass solutions for its end users, that it's the company's platform that's in the hands of customers. 

The company's doing that through a design philosophy closely linked to rigorous testing and user feedback. During a dinner event with media members, CEO Filip Kaliszan describes testing new products and features in his own home, passionately describing features that he admits “aren’t ready quite yet." 

“Anyone who knows me and certainly anyone inside the company knows I love doing prototype installs,” he said during his keynote. “I spend my weekends doing this, by the way. My family here can attest to this. My typical weekend: I pull CAT cable, I install some cameras, and what’s amazing about that is you want to do that in conditions that are harsh. You want to be on the ladder, you want it to be inconvenient, and I push the whole team to do that all the time because that is where you learn about all the things that might go wrong with the product.” 

A testament to that philosophy is Verkada’s latest CF83-E Fisheye camera. A product that features what you’d come to expect with more power and a large sensor than its predecessor, but more importantly, it features a bubble level inside the install plate, Other ease of installation features include a reduction in the number of screws needed for mounting (two) and an audio toggle. All told, it's a 40% faster installation time for the product.  

The man responsible for that sleek design is Verkada’s Vice President of Design John Russel, someone with a self-described deep nostalgia for the early product designs of the company (although he is particularly proud of their new bullet camera). Russel describes the design philosophy at the company as being “15 minutes in the future." The company, he said, has its design informed by customer feedback, learning through its hardware. 

But hardware isn’t the whole story for Verkada. Its cloud-based software is at the heart of its products and the company said it's working to bring an increasing number of features to its users through its command platform, which now boasts 150,000-plus monthly active users.  

“That’s very exciting to me,” said Kaliszan. “A couple of years ago when we first started talking about the platform, that story wasn’t clear. People said, ‘Hey, you should stick to cameras, just make cameras better.' But with this number I feel very good that the platform story is playing out well, and we’re really delivering value to you through many of our products, and of course it makes sense, our products work better together.”