Sudhindra Holla, Director, Axis Communications outlines the development around new products and the impact on the partner ecosystem during the pandemic
What are the latest announcements and updates from Axis Communications?
We have recently launched the AXIS S3008 Recorder that boost the end to end solutions that we, at Axis Communications, proudly vouch for, helping the customers to build a solution entirely with Axis. AXIS S3008, primarily strengthens our end to end offering where 8 devices can be connected all-in-one and can also be controlled by this particular device from one single console in an affordable price. It is very easy to install and has an intuitive interface as well.This solution also complements a multi-site architecture for an end to end solution from Axis, making it highly apt for customers with regards to multi-site installations of multiple small cameras all coming in a central site. Thus, it is way beyond a normal eight-channel recorder.
The second announcement we are making is the five-year warranty across Axis product portfolio, which was three-year until recentlyThis is a first-of-its-kind initiative in a competitive market, offering a comprehensive five-year warranty from the day of purchasing and a remarkable step towards our claim in offering quality products and the high-end our manufacturing processes that goes behind it.
Apart from this, we are seeing a big offtake of our solutions, especially during the time of the pandemic. For example, the Occupancy Estimator, that estimates how many people are there in a particular area. There are also a lot of trends with third party software vendors who have writing application on Axis edge cameras and some on server based software where one can offer return to office solutions like Touch Free Attendance Systems, automating announcements based on incidents, Mask Detection Solutions and thermal cameras. Although, our cameras are not designed for detecting the human body temperature accurately. There are a lot of third-party software vendor and integrators who utilize our thermal camera and integrate third party software that detects human body temperature Overall, our effort has been to offer end-to-end solution to the customers to cater to their post pandemic requirement, with our recent launch and announcements.
With respect to the five-year warranty, how would it work in case of the existing products which already had a three-year warranty? Will you extend the warranty to those existing products or newly purchased solutions?
Our new product policy of a five-year warranty would be available for all the new and ongoing purchases.This announcement has been be implemented from Oct 1, 2020 for all the new products. However, we have also decided to extend the warranty for products purchased in the recent past and have also decided to extend it back by 6 months. Hence,anybody who bought our products on and after April 1,2020 from our distributors would be eligible for this five-year warranty.
Before this new policy change, customers had the option of buying an extended warranty of five years during product purchase. We continue to support those as they bought the extra warranty pack at the time of the purchase.
What does that mean in an enterprise level, especially those who purchased between April and 30th Sept as they would have signed some existing SLAs and those SLAs would have certain conditions. So how does this extension to the five-year warranty impact those sellers?
It is not an issue for the people who have already bought the extended warranty as that has been taken care of in the system. What we are trying to do is track all the shipments that has happened post April 1, 2020 in the system and are trying to automatically cover those under the extended warranty else the registration process by our customers and partners would be highly taxing and time consuming. We have decided to extend it for all shipments that is done on or after Oct 1 to automatically update it on our end without extra paperwork.
With context to the recorder, in terms of certain setups with previously installed components from competitors, can it be synced together?
Our S3008 recorder will be backward compatible with all AXIS equipment. This device now will be compatible with our other Axis recorders, including our S11 and S22 series of recorders if our customers would like to migrate from their existing recorders to this in a phased manner. Hence, it would be available for migration as the technology can be easily integrated. Additionally, a lot of new network audio solutions and our AXIS Control can too be integrated with this particular device. It will not be a challenge in terms of integration into the network for customers who have already made investments with Axis.
In terms of traction, what are some of the vertical use cases that you have seen maybe beyond normal use cases that you generally experience? What sort of products and solutions are being deployed more during these times?
As people started coming back to office, the major demand was for temperature detection solutions or fever detection solutions. Everybodyresuming office wanted to check the temperature of the person entering the premises across not just at offices but also across government institutions, IT companies, malls to name a few. They mainly wanted to install a system where there is a display, a camera, a software running to track the temperature of people walking in. Additionally, we saw a demand in other solutions like Touch Free Attendance and solutions relating to social distancing and its compliance. There was also a traction for Occupancy Estimation. For instance, not more than 50 people are supposed to be in a hall. The moment there is a 5 or 10% increase, the concerned person will be notified with our solution to take the necessary action. People Counting was another solution where we experienced an uptake. These technologies can be used for compliance and thus, we experienced increasing enquiries for the same from the demand point of view.
People are also looking at securing their office and factory premises with our perimeter solutions and are opting for either upgrading their perimeter solutions or invest in new perimeter solutions. This applies to segments including critical infrastructure and manufacturing establishments as there were not enough people to manually monitor the place.
Apart from this, we saw a lot of traction related to cybersecurity. Cyberattacks has been on the rise especially during the pandemic – India was experiencing the highest cyberattacks. Hence, we saw a big demand come in from people who wanted to upgrade their systems. We, at Axis Communications, being a Swedish company, strictly maintain a no back-door policy across our product portfolio. Our firmware is one of the most robust in the industry. We have been in this industry for almost 25 years when it comes to network cameras. We have hardened the firmware as much as possible and the chance of any vulnerability or anyone to break through very easily is very difficult.
Last but not the least, there was also a traction with regards to people building large data centres, both public as well as the private, due to the large consumption of data lately. These centres need high, reliable and cyber secure cameras.
There was also a noticeable demand relating to projects like smart cities, safe cities and traffic related investments as the authorities wanted police to use more product to work solutions during the pandemic for better services. Hence, they started implementing the traffic policies and check traffic violations throughsmart cameras and automatic challans to ensure strict adherence of the traffic rules.
Is it correct to say that there is a reduction in some of the public areas which has been sort offset by the increase in adoption in many of the private spaces?
While we say that there is an increase in demand for areas that we have already mentioned, we also saw that, since the businesses are not doing well, many organizations have become cautious. They are postponing the decisions or not going ahead with the upgradation of their systems. While wemay not have an accurate figure, one would have offset the other in terms of the demand in my personal opinion.
In these challenging times, when most organizations were working remotely, how did you manage the deployment especially with a disruption in the supply chain?
Initially, we faced challenges due to lockdown. We could not ship our equipment and our products were stuck at the customs or even if our distributors had the material, they couldn’t ship it out to our partners and eventually to our customers. Post unlock, we were able to get the necessary shipments into the country through borders and the customs were cleared through the distributors.
We did see a challenge in terms of the deployment because in some cases the equipment went to the customers where they were not fully back at the office and thus those installations couldn’t be carried out. In some cases, some customers went in for a partial installation. For other cases, we faced a challenge of our partners or our global integrators not being available to go to the site for installations.
Even now, there are sites where the equipement have just reached and our partners are not being able to install due to a halt in approval from customers due to lack of supervision of these installations. Having said that, we would say the percentage of such cases have been decreasing over time since the unlock. Our partners were able to install about 70% to 80% of what we ship and commission the equipement. However, we are still left to overcome the remaining 20% of the challenges which we hope we will overcome soon.
How does this current situation of operations affect the existing contracts?
We always sell our products and solutions through our distributors instead of directly going to the customers. The invoice goes to the distributors and we deal with them, who invoices the same to their partners. That’s where we sometimes see a challenge when the partners are not unable to collect money from customers, thus, leading to an extended time. In some exceptional cases, even our distributors have come back to us since they didn’t receive the money. We have taken a few of these on a case to case basis and tried to mitigate some of the challenges. The brunt of this are taken by the distributors because they negotiate with partners when partners came back with the concerns. Those negotiations had an overall impact because it is not an unlimited margin to hold inventory and invest. Hence, even though some projects were of a real challenge, majority of the cases got resolved. We cannot make a blanket rule for everything. We investigate the merit of the case and thus decide what kind of flexibility we can provide for the customers.
Were there directly any relief packages or financial incentives from Axis that could beat through the distributors to the partners?
Since we invoice the distributors, we have no obligation when it comes to the partners. We took few cases which were exceptional in nature and we tried to solve these concerns with the distributors by offering what could be the best solution in this current situation. We were flexible from that point of view. This resulted in them eventually mitigating the situation with their partners as well.
With regards to technology synchronization or business synchronization, was there any collaboration solutions by Axis Communications?
We are seeing applications in the broadcast category of cameras, with context to an event or a classroom, training, and professional grade performance. People have used our cameras for these kinds of applicationsfor a face to face experience. The other application that we are seeing an uptake is the public announcement solutions. Historically, these solutions have been quite analog in nature and difficult to implement and manage. The costs werealso high when it comes to managing large analog audio solutionswhen it is not integrated in any way to IP solutions. Thus, it tends to become a silo kind of an operation in nature. We are seeing a lot of applications where people have started taking public announcement solutions from Axis. With Axis, one can use a simple mic for announcements and broadcast it from different speakers easily.. Additionally, we saw broadcast solutions like YouTube run on our cameras for a professional grid video.
Have you seen any increase in uptake of use cases with regards to analytics solutions in this pandemic?
We are quite overwhelmed with the use of analytics off late because up until last year, the implementation of analytical solutions was not as high as now. A small category of people was using analytics to a large extent. It was mainly used for view monitor record and thumb integration with audio and forensic. This has shifted and we can see that people have moved to these solutions. The demand in organizations for solutions like mask detection have led to the emergence of applications like these.
Most of the marketing events that we executed in the last quarter led to the involvement of software vendor. For instance, when we did something for the pharma industry, we spoke jointly about our product offering with a software vendor about the return to office solutions, how we can maintain continuity in their manufacturing plants, how they can build compliance on a corrosive environment using our solutions and software, like notifications to name a few. We go beyond the camera language to drill down into what solutions customers want and give it to them. We have also conducted such workshops for datacenters, pharma and the retail sectors. We took up each segment, understood their concerns, aligned the solutions with a solution partner to address the specific concerns to deliver a holistic end to end offering.
In the last few months, how did Axis balance among the three situations, retaining existing customers, helping them upgrade their existing solutions and acquiring new customers?
Even though, we faced challenges initially, we did a few things once the unlock was announced. We ran a lot of digital campaigns for our existing end customers and rolled out our academy training. Our marketing team put up the entire training online to our consultants, customers and partners. This was very well received by them. This was an excellent platform to educate the customers what solutions we have, as academy training is not just about Axis products and solutions. It encompasses the entire network video and audio systems and how one can integrate to solve various problems. Thus, in this way, we could train the customers and help ourselves to create a solution as a suggestion or demand from them. We also approached our partners who are very specialized in certain industry segments to tap specific segments. For instance, education sector was thriving to deliver online classes.. We then invited customers from the education industry and very specifically ran the content with those partners and integrators tuning our messaging to cater to that specific sector. Likewise, we conducted similar sessions for critical infrastructure and pharma.
For existing customers, we also picked some top 12- 15 customers and decided to go forward with our seed unit programs where they tried out the equipment on how it will work out for various applications for a duration of 6 months to see whether it turns into a further sell or not. We showed the gesture of making an investment with the customer and it was well received by them. We also conducted a lot of webinars and it opened the platform for various heathy discussions and feedback. We also went deeper with some of our application partners. We brainstormed and came up with a list ofeither segments or customers and then we invited them out to make them aware of what they can do with Axis solutions.
What are the areas that you would like to focus on from a business perspective in the next couple of quarters? From the technology, what are the solutions that you would like to focus on?
We would probably go deeper on a thumb segment related approach with regards to datacenters and the critical infrastructure. We are also seeing a new trend where pharma needs a lot of explosion protected cameras which we unearthed during some opportunities in the webinars we conducted..
Additionally, we are looking at smart city, safe city, retail, warehousing, manufacturing, and education as well. We will go deeper into these segments with focused events through our partners. We will also utilize some agencies to bring in CIOs and CXOs of organizations to create demand through digital forums. While we are going deep with our existing channel, we are also trying to see whether we can rope in new channel partners from IT field who are doing network storage or computer applications to look at our solutions. We have simplified the process to a single vendor asit’s also easy to install and maintain and brings a lot of benefits.
Is there a gradual change in profile of the partner ecosystem that Axis had?
The convergence started long back, and the line is diffusing. We have seen that most of the security partners have migrated to IP. For them, the challenge was all individual non-IT based proprietary systems of the past. The traditional players in the security industry are converging into IP and on the other side, there are people from the compute, storage systems doing it vice versa. We are using this to lure in more partners because we are one of the innovative companies in the market. We have come a long way in terms of making our solutions quite unique and simple to use its on open architecture. We don’t lock in the customer with a proprietary system. We are able to see a lot of new partners looking at our solutions. For instance, we run a program called an audio specific program where we are specifically trying to get on boardroom and public announcement related audio partners who never sold Axis before. This program is conducted to educate them and see how they and the customers can benefit from our solutions. We are going to IT only partners through a program – end to end specialist program. That’s gained a lot of traction as well. With regards to the channel side, we have accomplished a lot in the last 4-5 months through digital platforms as we can reach out to a wider channel partner audience.
Since surveillance has been deployed heavily in manufacturing with the inclusion of IoTs and sensors, is there anything on plan regarding IoTs and sensors?
Everything is moving to IoT, where even cameras have sensors. The audio when it goes to the network becomes a sensor. Like that, Axis has always encouraged that these things should not be proprietary in nature, which means, if a video sees something and wants to communicate automatically though the audio, the process should be seamless.Axis Communications was one of the early companies were the early adopters of IP based cameras. We were able to integrate audio, IP seamlessly and make it work in a fashion where the customer can operate with minimum effort. From that point of view, IoT takes a big space and camera eventually becomes a sensor in an IoT platform.