Video Surveillance Market Growing

Pivot3 hopes $24 million in additional funding and success with city government customers will expand the reach of its RAIGE technology. 

Bell said that the video surveillance market is growing rapidly, with the advances in digital video technology, and that storage for a video surveillance system can account for 50 percent of the system's cost. "The pixels and resolutions in surveillance cameras are getting higher, with wider views, the ability to recognize faces and read license plates now," he said.  The increase in file size and, in some cases, governmental requirements to store the images for a period of time are overloading storage capabilities.

For markets such as government, especially in the area of homeland security, storage requirements are crucial.  "An airport, for example, may have to shut down if they don't have cameras or storage that works," Bell said.  Casinos are also a huge market for Pivot3's technology, said Bell, since many have thousands of cameras and are regulated by state governments and the gaming commission for image storage compliance.

Jasper Bruinzeel, vice president of marketing and sales for Wi4Net, a Pivot3 partner, said his customers are pleased with the Pivot3 storage technology because it works so well. "Literally we haven't had any issues with their systems, and they've been a great partner," he said. Bruinzeel's company, a division of CelPlan, focuses on city government customers with video surveillance needs. 

So far, Bruinzeel counts the city of Long Beach and the city of Milwaukee as customers, and hopes that the Pivot3 technology will have other cities calling.  "This is a fairly new area for us as a company, and there are only a handful of these types of systems so far," Bruinzeel said.  "But our goal is to add many, many more cities and to have them on board with the technology from day one," he said, though he did not discuss specific growth targets.

Outside of city governments and casinos, Bruinzeel sees a lot of opportunities for other partners. "There are lots of vertical markets where storage plays a role," adding that his company doesn't plan to enter markets such as health care and financial services. 

Bell said that Pivot3's RAIGE technology would be a great fit in the health care industry, since digital imaging of patient records is creating larger and larger files and that hospitals need to comply with HIPPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) requirements for image and record storage.

"There's nothing specific to the video surveillance market—you can store anything you want on this.  There are a lot of potential markets that need constant access to data, like high-performance computing, health care, public safety and city government," he said.