Q)- How the global market trends are bolstering growth in surveillance segment?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- One of the main key drivers for the surveillance market growth is the development of smart cities.
The United Nations has projected that 66% of the world’s population will be living in urban cities by 2050 with Asia being a major driving force behind this phenomenon. With the unprecedented growth in urbanization, governments are under constant pressure to develop infrastructure and implement policies that can lead the way towards economically, socially and environmentally sustainable societies.
Technology has been the cornerstone in aiding country leaders towards achieving this goal. In fact, Navigant Research forecasts that annual smart city technology investments in Asia Pacific will almost quadruple by 2023, reaching $11.3 billion. No matter how you define and measure the smarts of a city, most experts agree that there will be a marked increase in the number of data-generating devices and applications – surveillance cameras, sensors, location-based apps and services – that collect information from and about the metropolis to give its leaders a pulse of the city to help them determine if implementation or policy changes are required.
Other key factors that have driven the surveillance market growth include security concerns, technology enhancements, the trend of IoT, big data, video analytics, etc.
Q)- What is Seagate’s outlook on Indian security market with special reference to surveillance storage?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- India has some of the largest cities in the world: Delhi – 25 million inhabitants, and Mumbai – 21 million inhabitants. In such large urban cities, safety and security would be prime concerns for individuals and organisations. Naturally, surveillance systems in India have become an indispensable part of the country’s infrastructure. We also have seen an upsurge of the focus in this domain with initiatives like Digital India and smart cities agenda introduced by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. According to BIS Research’s study, the Indian Video Surveillance market is expected to reach $8.24 billion by 2022 leading to huge amount of data generation.
In line with the projects initiated by the government of India, the quantum of installations that have taken place have attracted most of the global brands dealing in surveillance equipment. We have recently observed surveillance cameras being set up at railway stations, housing estates, traffic signals, metro stations, markets, public parks etc.
Recently, India is also witnessing a surge in the use of video surveillance by sectors like banking, finance, hospitality, transportation, education and retail, etc. resulting in increased amount of unstructured data being generated.
Q)- What is the strategy adopted by Seagate for India?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- Seagate is in a prime position to continue breaking barriers to deliver high-capacity, cost-effective, innovative and robust surveillance solutions to support surveillance systems.
Seagate recently announced the SkyHawk in India. Equipped with the industry’s latest technologies, it is optimized for today and tomorrow’s surveillance system. For example, the Image Perfect™ technology for video recording has frame integrity in up to 64 camera environments and this is far ahead of the existing 32 camera environment support in the market.
“According to Seagate’s ‘Video Surveillance Trend Report’, organizations in India typically use an average of 249 cameras for their surveillance system. As per 6Wresearch, the Indian video surveillance market is projected to grow at a compounded annual growth of over 13 percent between 2016 and 2022.”
All these instances have been triggering the increase in usage of surveillance cameras and is also expected to lead to a significant increase in the amount of data that needs to be stored and in turn will drive demand for larger and smarter storage solutions.
Keeping in view, the demand for efficient and reliable storage technologies, Seagate plans to play a bigger role in India with its cutting edge technology. Seagate is the first in the world to pioneer a purpose-built, optimized drive for surveillance systems a decade ago. We will continue to innovate and offer our partners and customers an extensive range of surveillance products and solutions that are safe, smart and secure for their surveillance applications.
Q)- What are the new opportunities emerging for Seagate?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- India is one of the largest centres for information processing (owing to the growth of the IT & outsourcing sector), and thus has ample to be protected. The security landscape in India is at par with the rest of the world, and similarly so, there are certain things that need to be taken care of with a security perspective.
Despite standing on the edge of a digital revolution, Indian organizations face a serious scarcity of skilled cyber security professionals. And with the initiatives of the current Indian government such as Digital India and Smart Cities, infrastructure is now becoming highly advanced in terms of overall network and communications. However, the abundant use of ICT, IoT, M2M, cloud computing, etc. has limitations as well as potential risks due to lack of knowledge on IT security.
Firstly, to be ‘smart’, many of the services the city offers, such as electricity or water may need web interface to ensure accessibility. Secondly, all the services and monitors need to have endless connectivity for these applications to work efficiently as failure of connectivity will halt these activities. And finally, these applications will have large amounts of personal data that has to be safeguarded and protected to ensure that the data is not being compromised in any manner.
Hence, there is a need to treat data protection and information security with utmost importance to keep Smart Cities secured.
“This has to be a shared responsibility of the Government, service providers and the citizens. While the Government and service providers need to ensure that they put in place the necessary infrastructure and processes for keeping the smart services available and secure, it is up to the citizens to be aware of the risks and to take necessary precautions.”
As we see more and more of the population concentrated at the urban cities, and with the government of India turning to technology to help enforce and expand public infrastructure, we will see huge growth in the relevant segments.
In addition to this, we expect surveillance to continue to grow in the retail and banking segments as these businesses further invest in this area. These businesses are not just doing this for security, but also for better business results. For example, a bank in India was facing issues with its ATM digital video recorders (DVRs) due to data loss and video capture issues. This was leading to a high amount of downtime for the ATMs, leading to customer frustration especially in remote locations where there were fewer ATM. Seagate worked with its partners to install Seagate’s surveillance drives in the ATM DVRs, and this has decreased the downtime of ATMs by almost 80%, ultimately reducing the bank’s operating costs. We see a great opportunity for us in these segments as the businesses realize the true power of using surveillance system for their business to grow.
Q)- What are the latest product innovations and product offerings by Seagate for surveillance storage market in India?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- Seagate has recently launched Seagate’s latest 10TB SkyHawk for surveillance systems relying on large storage solutions for network video recording (NVR). For Seagate, purpose-built or optimized doesn’t just mean high capacity or higher speed. When Seagate calls it ‘optimized,’ it means the drive offers specific technologies that can best manage the data workload and maximize the value of the data. For SkyHawk, it uses rotational vibration sensors to help minimize read/write errors, and can support the razor sharp vision of 64 cameras, more than any other drive on the market. In addition, ImagePerfect firmware supports 24×7 surveillance-optimized workloads tuned to record 90% of the time and play back video footage the remaining 10%, and supports more cameras recording at higher resolutions than traditional drives.
Seagate is also working closely with the surveillance market leaders’ R&D teams to develop the best-in-class solutions that ensure customer data is safe and secure.
Q)- What is the Seagate‘s strategy to be a leading partner in Smart City Mission and Safe City Projects?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- The surveillance market in India is growing at a great pace. With the country’s focus on smart cities and the rising need for better safety and security, the emphasis and relevance of video surveillance is increasing
Video surveillance and surveillance infrastructure will play a significant role in the fulfilment of India’s plan to build 100 smart cities by 2020.
This means there will be a marked increase in the number of data-generating devices and applications – surveillance cameras, sensors, location-based apps and services – that collect information from and about the metropolis to give its leaders a pulse of the city to help them determine if implementation or policy changes are required.
Seagate is the first to pioneer a purpose-built drive for surveillance systems a decade ago. This means we have the experience, knowledge and technology in surveillance that has been built up for more than a decade. We use this expertise that we acquired over generations of solutions to build these drives designed specifically for video surveillance storage. We trust that we are in the great position to support the Smart City and Safe City initiatives.
Q)- What are the recent awards won by Seagate?
Mr.Sameer Bhatia)- Seagate has recently won the following awards in India;
We recently declared the winner in the category of “BEST INTERNAL HARD DISK DRIVE” in the 15th EDITION of StarNite Awards 2016 by Var India.
‘MOST INNOVATIVE PRODUCTS OF THE YEAR ’ Winner Award Category in 9th NCN Award Night
