| 2007 North American Video Surveillance Product Innovation of
the Year Award Recipient: Hie Electronics, Inc.
September 25, 2007
I. Market Overview/Key Challenges
In
the present-day video surveillance market, the need for
storage is very high. The market is looking at
cost-effective options that cater to storing large amount of
data for long-term applications. In this scenario, one of
the major restraints in the video surveillance industry is
the cost of storing data in a large system. This includes
buying the storage system, licensing the software to run the
system, and maintaining the system in a typical data center
environment with personnel to oversee the functioning of the
system.
Hence,
the major differentiator for a digital storage product under
the digital video recorder (DVR) category would be its
ability to provide a total system solution that is
cost-effective in storing data for long-term requirements.
At
present, there are several video surveillance applications
that require video and image storage for data spanning
several years. Such applications are present in the homeland
security space that is governed by statutory requirements
for video archiving. The storage systems that use redundant
array of independent disks (RAID) for fault tolerance and
performance are constrained in the aspect of data storage
over long periods of time. The prevailing hard drive cost
restricts the data storage period to not more than 10 to 15
days.
Given
the shortcomings of such a system, the concern over data
storage for more than 30 days is the primary issue that
needs to be addressed.
II. Award Categories and Relevance
The
market for longer term data storage offers significant
opportunities in terms of product innovations to reduce the
overall costs of sourcing, owning, and operating a data
repository. The costs of these systems can be of great
significance as there is a shift from the regular megabyte
storage capacities to those in the range of terabytes.
A
classic application of this would be a subway-monitoring
system that consists of about 50 cameras operating all day
long. A video transfer rate of 2 megabytes per second
coupled with a three-year archiving requirement will mean
handling a considerably large amount of data. This needs a
system that can source, own and operate about 1.1 petabytes
of data. Transmitting such a large amount of data over a
network consumes a lot of bandwidth, and this concern needs
to be addressed.
In
addition, developing a compatible system on a leading
service platform technology is likely to be of critical
value in ensuring that an exhaustive range of applications
can be supported.
Hence,
a large enterprise-level storage requirement can prove very
expensive if a comprehensive system-level solution is not in
place. These factors together make long-term data storage a
niche application within the video surveillance space, in
which innovation would be the primary differentiating
factor.
III. 2007 North American Video Surveillance Product
Innovation of the Year Award
Award Description
The
Frost & Sullivan Award for Product Innovation of the Year
Award is presented each year to the company that has
demonstrated excellence in new products and technologies
within its industry. The recipient company has shown
innovation by launching a broad line of emerging products
and technologies.
Research Methodology
To
choose a recipient of this Award, the analyst team tracks
all new product launches, R&D spending, products in
development, and new product features and modifications.
This is accomplished through interviews with the market
participants and extensive secondary and technology
research. All new product launches and new products in
development in each company are compared and evaluated based
on degree of innovation and customer satisfaction. Companies
are then ranked by number of new product launches and new
products in development.
Measurement Criteria
In
addition to the methodology described above, there are
specific criteria used to determine final competitor
rankings in this industry. The recipient of this Award has
excelled based on one or more of the following criteria:
- Significance of new product(s) in its industry
- Competitive advantage of new product(s) in its industry
- Product innovation in terms of unique or revolutionary technology
- Product acceptance in the marketplace
- New products value-added services provided to customers
- Number of competitors with similar product(s)
Hie
Electronics, Inc. is the recipient of the 2007 Frost &
Sullivan Award for Product Innovation of the Year in the
North American video surveillance market. The company has
been recognized for its product innovation capabilities in
reducing the total cost of ownership in video surveillance
applications with deep archive requirements.
Company Overview
Founded in 2004, the company aims at developing,
manufacturing, and selling dense optical recording solutions
to meet the government and corporate security needs. Powered
by a workforce with an established background in information
technology, networking, and software, the company has made
an ambitious foray into long-term permanent storage. Its
breakthrough solutions offer low-cost advanced optical
storage integrated with patented software on a PC platform.
With a relatively low-priced product line that offers very
high storage capacity when compared to DVR systems, it
caters to both wired and wireless systems. Its products find
applications in homeland and corporate asset security. In
addition, due to their requirement for huge data storage,
the company also caters to casinos, large multi-store chains
and convenience stores, and the medical industry.
Overcoming the Cost barrier
The
main concern in the storage space is the extremely high cost
that one has to incur while archiving data for more than 30
days. The usual digital hard-drive based solutions become
increasingly ineffective in terms of cost and reliability in
case of storage requirements in terabyte levels. At an
enterprise level implementation, it is also necessary to
look at the total cost of ownership of the system. This
amounts to addressing a wide range factors encompassing
operating costs, hardware and software costs, and personnel
to manage the system.
Hie
Electronics' TeraStack® solution and TBYTe®
series, in addition to being easy to use and compatible
across video surveillance systems have been designed and
developed to address these concerns. The company offers a
definite overall cost advantage through its systems designed
for data storage capabilities beyond terabytes, in the
petabyte range. The cost of a 50 terabyte system is
$245,000, which includes the fee for the licensed software.
When this is benchmarked with a characteristic
hard-drive-based system with similar data storage
capabilities, which costs millions of dollars, it offers a
clear cost advantage.
The TeraStack/TBYTe Solution
The
TBYTe®
series offers a hybrid flash,
hard disk drive (HDD) and Blu-ray dense optical storage with
read-write and write-once options. The TBYTe®
25 or 50 (named based on the terabytes of storage space
available) is 30 inches tall and fits into a 19-inch
rack-mounted model, giving it a distinct size-to-storage
space advantage over other RAID array-based storage systems.
It contains eight TeraStack®
storage stacks with a capacity of 6.25 terabytes each. At
present, each TeraStackTM
can store up to 125 optical media. The TBYTe®,
in its 8 TeraStacks, can randomly access up to 1000 Blu-ray
discs and can simultaneously record, store and replay data
to remote clients.
One of
the many diverse features of the TeraStack®
solution is its ability to be remounted into a different
TBYTe®
unit after a period of time with the file structure intact.
This
system, with the ability to archive and retrieve such vast
amounts of data, operates with the same amount of power as
consumed by a single PC, which is close to 800 Watts.
Consequently, the amount of heat generated when compared to
hard-drive based solutions is very low, which dispenses the
rigorous data management environment of large data storage
systems. In addition, the system is also energy-passive even
as it is scaled to higher levels of data storage.
Furthermore, with advanced alarm systems and enabled
forensic analysis embedded within the system, the product
has an unequivocal competitive advantage.
Chart
1.1 illustrates the competitive advantages of TBYTe 25/50
for the video surveillance market in North America for 2007
Chart 1.1
Video Surveillance Market: Competitive advantages of TBYTe 25/50, (North America), 2007
The Total System Standpoint: Operation, Scalability and Compatibility
Designing a long term storage system is a combination of
factors that determine its regular operation, scalability,
and compatibility.
Several applications in video surveillance such as medical
data storage need non-volatile data to be stored for a
period of more than 20 years. In these situations, if the
data storage system is unreliable, it can involve migrating
huge amount of data across the network.
On the
other hand, the TeraStack® solution offers the
unique option of storing the data for the entire period and
then destroying it when needed.
Hie
Electronics has developed unique software which monitors any
data generating application real time. This powerful
product element is a key component of the Hie Electronics
TBYTe® and TeraStack® solution. A wide
variety of data generation applications can run on this
platform, as it offers a clear demarcation at the kernel
level between application and TeraStack® solution
storage extension. Using ISO-grade software development
tools based upon JAVA, JBOSS,
J2ee, and Oracle, the Hie Electronics TBYTe®
is compatible with a large number of presently
available applications including many different video
surveillance system platforms. The compatibility of the
software gives the TBYTe® a distinctive
capability to provide extended data storage to any data
generating applications and especially DVR systems within
the TBYTe® platform. On the other hand, the
TeraStack® solution can also provide existing
legacy, network centric and or analog systems the advantage
of long-term data storage.
Network Data Access
With
limited bandwidth capacities of existing networks, accessing
large amounts of data across them can become very
challenging. In large systems that could have thousands of
security cameras, this can result in bandwidth usage.
Network-based systems are moving toward edge-of-network data
compression techniques to limit bandwidth usage. The TBYTe®
series employs the H.264, MPEG4 Part-10 compression to limit
the bandwidth consumed by the streamed video. Furthermore,
query-based data retrieval from the host system to the
client system reduces network traffic.
Chart 1.2 illustrates the Hie
Electronics -The Complete Product Innovation Overview for
the video surveillance market in North America for 2007
Chart 1.2
Video Surveillance Market: Hie
Electronics -The Complete Product Innovation Overview,
(North America), 2007
IV. Summary of Best Practices
Hie
Electronics has a strong product development competence
oriented toward long-term data storage, which is expected to
ensure the company's technical leadership in this industry.
With a cost-effective product with unique physical and
software characteristics, it has obtained a definite edge
over its immediate competitors within this product region.
Patented kernel-level software provides it with the critical
lead of a couple of years to enhance its product line. Frost
& Sullivan expects that this lead coupled with its
engineering force will propel it toward further product
innovation in the optical data storage arena. Hence, Frost &
Sullivan presents Hie Electronics with the 2007 Product
Innovation of the Year Award for the video surveillance
market in North America.
About Best Practices
Frost & Sullivan Best Practices Awards recognize companies
in a variety of regional and global markets for
demonstrating outstanding achievement and superior
performance in areas such as leadership, technological
innovation, customer service, and strategic product
development. Industry analysts compare market participants
and measure performance through in-depth interviews,
analysis, and extensive secondary research in order to
identify best practices in the industry.
About Frost & Sullivan
Frost & Sullivan, a global growth consulting company, has
been partnering with clients to support the development of
innovative strategies for more than 40 years. The company's
industry expertise integrates growth consulting, growth
partnership services, and corporate management training to
identify and develop opportunities. Frost & Sullivan serves
an extensive clientele that includes Global 1000 companies,
emerging companies, and the investment community by
providing comprehensive industry coverage that reflects a
unique global perspective and combines ongoing analysis of
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