Video company Camio has largest enterprise install to date

SAN MATEO, Calif.—Camio, a cloud-based video monitoring company based here, recently published some of its experiences working with a large real estate company.

Camio, founded in 2011, brings real-time search capabilities to video cameras through artificial intelligence. The company provides the back-end for IC Realtime's Ella platform, which was announced earlier this year. Camio's platform allows for searching through archived data using simple language, such as “people in blue near mailbox,” and offers cloud storage and personalized alerts.

Camio originally started as a way for people to look in on their house through repurposed smartphones and tablets. The company debuted its more recent solutions for security at ISC West 2017 and now has more than 100,000 users total.

Carter Maslan, CEO and co-founder of Camio, told Security Systems News, “Our company mission is be the open, smart video processing pipeline that works with all existing camera sources.”

For the recent real estate deployment, Camio released that it was working with a security operations center connected to a total of 24,000 cameras, across 800 locations.

“When we did the trial, we thought we were heroic in coming at a price that was similar to a consumer camera subscription plan,” Maslan said, but the client wanted it at about one-third of the initial price.

Defining the different needs for different cameras was a key part of fitting the solution to the price point, according to Maslan. “One of the big 'a-ha's in that whole thing was: don't think of just rolling out video surveillance, think about: what is each camera doing, what kinds of analytics and searching is needed, what kind of response times do you need, how fast do the alerts have to be? All of these variables gave us profiles of cameras that then let us really dial in the price to be the best value overall,” Maslan said.

Schedule based recording was another factor in this SOC installation, Maslan said, such as when “the security operations center just wants [certain] sets of cameras to be actively indexed for alerts and searched from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. And that happened to correlate with the most security vulnerable periods of the day anyway. So, it was a big cost savings and a big improvement in just ease of administering—to just associate schedules with every camera.”

This is the largest enterprise application for Camio to date, utilizing one security operations center.

“The biggest take away was just varying the service level by the type of camera,” Maslan said. “That was the big realization; it seems obvious in retrospect, but was kind of a new focus for us.”

The evaluation and planning took about nine months, with most of the work happening in six months. “It was a long cycle, but it was because of the fact that we were learning and adjusting as we go. Now, I don't think it would be anywhere near that. If we were to do this over again, we would know all the answers quickly and it could probably be … less than two months just from planning to implementation,” Maslan said.

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