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l Shipp’s résumé reads like the Silicon Valley phone book. He has worked with and for numerous technology companies on the West Coast and some of the most recognized names in IT. Since taking over the top role at 3VR five years ago, he has applied his expertise to the field of analytics, helping to drive innovation as video technology continues to take gargantuan leaps forward. SP&T News: Can you provide some details about your background? Al Shipp: I’m an engineer by training. I’ve loved engineering. I designed chips for General Motors, designed printers for IBM. I moved into product management, then, as a part of my career development, moved into sales. I fell in love with it, so I stayed in sales for another two decades or so. IBM moved me out to the West Coast and I was running about a $2 billion business for them in software. I was blown away by the start-up culture and all the innovation going on around the Bay area. I ended up leaving IBM and went to a number of small companies — all with usually enterprise customers, mostly software. I ended up talking to Apple and they convinced me to come over and run their enterprise group, so I did that for five years. It was a fantastic experience. It was basically enabling any business or government to use Apple technology. I was there from the beginning of 2004 to the end of 2008. SP&T: How much of your experience with IBM and Apple comes into play at 3VR? AS: I guess there’s a couple of things. The customer expects a good experience. They expect the technology to work; they want your company to be there if it doesn’t. I’ve told this to multiple companies: if you’re in the technology business, invariably something will break. That’s not the issue; everybody has that issue. It’s how you respond when that happens is what differentiates you. When I say customers, that includes the partners who work with the [end users]. That’s a key part of our culture and it’s always been something that’s important
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with Al Shipp, CEO, 3VR By Neil Sutton
to me. The other thing that’s kind of interesting — being a technology guy, I’ve watched technology trends ... I was an engineer at the end of the mainframe era, and watched [technology] move to distributed computing to PCs, to the Internet to mobile devices. The security business is going to participate
already building cameras that can resolve more information than the human eye can. The use cases for those cameras get more and more limited. Ultimately, I think the market gets smaller as we get more dense cameras. The flip side is, I believe there is technology that will rise up and leverage that. Analytics is a great
“Anything that a human can do visually, odds are you can do it with video.” in those waves of technology in a similar way. They might end up being more disruptive at the end of the day. In some cases, security is relatively slow to adapt to new technology, and there’s good reasons for that. So I think when shifts happen, it can be profound. SP&T: Do you mean “profound” within the security industry itself? AS: If you look at the implications of technology shifts, the guys who are the winners in the current wave are usually not the winners in the next wave. Rarely do you see that happen. Sometimes they come back in a subsequent wave, but you never see companies pull off two waves in a row. In my view, security is going to see a similar kind of change. It’s happening in front of us as we speak. I just think that change might be more abrupt than traditional technology. SP&T: Is that what’s happening with IP-based technology? AS: IP is a great example. In video and surveillance, it’s been a little more painful. It’s painful because there’s a huge investment that already exists. You’ve already pulled BNC cables, you’ve got analogue cameras . . . it’s not a rip and replace situation . . . the economics don’t make sense. Even though digitizing video is not a new idea, it’s just now becoming economically feasible. I think the shift to IP is going to accelerate because of the economics, not because of the technology. I think that shift will have some profound implications. Depending on where you are in the marketplace as a vendor or a technology company, those shifts will affect you. Just like computers get faster, cheaper and more powerful, so do cameras. They’re prototyping 1,000 Megapixel cameras today. I’m thinking, What in the world do you do with that? We’re
example. The bulk of analytics research today is to mimic what a human can do — so, teach a system to recognize information on video just like a human would. That’s interesting and important, but now I’m going to have the capability to see more than a human can see. It bodes to a whole other class of analytics that can resolve video information at a much more granular level than a human can. But now I’ve got to have more computational resources to deal with all that information. That’s where Cloud infrastructure will probably have an interesting implication eventually. SP&T: Where does 3VR fit into this? AS: What it’s always done and what it was built to do is be the best at getting information from video. Our platform can manage dozens and dozens of analytics simultaneously while processing hundreds of video streams. It gets this metadata and combines it with other data. The security industry is interested in transaction systems like ATMs; it’s interested in access control information. We can do GPS, barcode — any kind other of information that gives the video information more context. The ability to combine this information has always been a unique proposition for 3VR. We’ve also done a really good job at helping customers leverage this technology while utilizing their own technology. A lot of customers have analogue cameras installed. We’ve helped them migrate gradually into IP cameras and megapixel technology. We see that accelerating. We’re watching our product mix go more and more IP. We’re not surprised with that. And then we’re starting to think really hard and to build solutions where we think the next generation of stuff is going to happen. It’s going to be video, it’s going to be security, but it’s going to be tons of non-security stuff.
We recently launched a retail analytics product which is basically: take this video and give me customer insights. How are my customers doing in my stores? Is the experience good or bad? Measure my effectiveness. We’ve had a ton of positive pull on that. If you think of video as just a source of information, it opens up all kinds of places you can use it. SP&T: How much of your business is strictly security? AS: We’re predominantly security today. Our two largest markets are banking and retail. Retail is probably our fastest growing. In terms of places we’re looking at . . . You can think of things like manufacturing and operations. Anything that a human can do visually, odds are you can do it with video. There’s two big categories of technology that are coming together at once. One of them is big data. For the first time, I’ve got the ability to store and access tons of information and that has not been easy to do in the past. The world’s unstructured data is probably more than 10 times structured data today and it’s growing well over 10 times faster. It’s this huge mountain of information that no one can get their arms around. We think we’re helping to solve that problem. The other wave of technology that’s going to be interesting is the Internet of Things. Video should be a big part of that. The question is, how do you do that? We’re architecting that . . . We see that happening pretty quickly. Unfortunately we don’t see it happening in the U.S. market first because the Internet infrastructure is pretty poor in the U.S. North America is probably not going to be the place where this emerges. Asia, where high speed networks are commonplace, may be the place where some of this cool video that’s participating in the Internet of Things could emerge first. SP&T: How is the security market changing with more data and IT players coming into it? AS: Any large technology company or carrier that makes a living on moving bits through a network should be interested in this business. There’s one thing that’s going to cause the most bits to move through the network and that’s going to be video. If you get paid on moving bits, you should be incredibly excited about the potential of video.