Unlocking Innovation: The Future of Security Technology Partnerships

00:07 - Steve Kenny (Host)

Hi and welcome to today's episode of Security Tech Talk. We're thrilled to welcome Jamie Donald, a seasoned professional with nearly 29 years in the security industry. Jamie has built an outstanding career working with some of the most recognizable names in the physical security industry. For the last 11 years, he's been an integral part of Axis Communications, where he has been a driving force behind many of the industry's most impactful technology partnerships that we see today.

00:35

Jamie currently serves as the program director for Axis' technology integration program, a benchmark initiative which is regarded as one of the best in class across the industry. This program brings together diverse organizations and enabling seamless integration and interoperability with a robust security ecosystem. In his role, Jamie manages key strategic relationships with Axis technology partners, including some of the biggest names that you'll recognize today. He oversees all partnership activities, ensuring a smooth collaboration across Axis' global sales regions. Jamie's expertise and his talent for cultivating meaningful partnerships have positioned him as a thought leader and a trusted voice in the security industry. Jamie, it's an absolute pleasure to have you on our podcast today, and welcome to today's episode.

01:30 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Thanks very much for having me, Steve. It's great to be here and obviously it's a topic I enjoy discussing at length.

01:36 - Steve Kenny (Host)

Brilliant. So, Jamie, I think from the experience that I've seen, obviously working with system integrators, working with a lot of end users, working within Axis, so you can see firsthand that there has never been one solution or one application if it was delivered by a single source supplier that has actually genuinely addressed the operational requirements of a client, whereas taking this best of breed sort of approach and being able to integrate lots of different technology partners in and focusing on the interoperability and the cause and effect, we've genuinely been able to deliver value beyond security to organizations. If we look at the landscape of technology partners and we see firsthand that they have traditionally come from a security background, where do you think the direction of travel is moving forward in terms of the value, in addition to security, that we can add?

02:34 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Sure, I mean, yeah, maybe jumping ahead a bit too soon, Steve, because I think it's good to reflect on the ongoing importance of, you know, the security market for for us certainly, and for for many of our ecosystem partners here. But it's a um, it's an ongoing process right to to move into some of these new solutions. And I, I think, and I think something I I did want to reflect on a bit as well and we'll we'll get into the future stuff for sure but is also something that's taken place in the video surveillance market, which is now, I think, supporting that transition is we started off with, or we not started off with. Over time, probably over 10, 15 years, I think we took in, I think I know over four and a half thousand partners. Now you know some of those are what I call one hit wonders, that they had a particular opportunity, they joined the program, they did the integration and the project was delivered. And actually that is kind of the beauty of that open, open ecosystem right where you can easily do the integration and then deliver a project, and and that you know that could well have been 15, 20 years ago someone from outside of the security industry. That was kind of the beauty of that open approach.

03:58

But it was definitely a much, much more fragmented market, whereas what we've seen over the past, particularly over the past 10 years, certainly since I've been at Axis, is that fragmented market has really started to consolidate.

04:14

You know, we know from our own kind of competition landscape who the main players are and I think you know generally that's what happens in markets, right, the leaders kind of have more and more to invest and then you get a number of companies that kind of become market leaders.

04:31

And I think we've seen that with our partnerships both. If I split the two main types of partnerships between the video management systems on the one hand, which is really, I would say, certainly on the traditional security installations, that's the core, the two core components. You know you can't have a system without the cameras and you can't have a system without something to view them through. But then the other group of partners that we've seen come in on the security side initially but again we're seeing more and more of a shift to different types of applications is of course on the analytics side. And I think from your work with the A&E community, the consultants we certainly seen over many, many years like a strong appetite for different types of analytics serving different types of use cases, and that again, both in security and in new types of non-security or operational efficiency business intelligence use cases that we're seeing developing.

05:36 - Steve Kenny (Host)

I want to pick up on something that you mentioned there, and it is, it was talking around how the industry is going through a consolidation process and there is no hiding fact that there's there's been many acquisitions over the last number of years and we're seeing organizations sort of taking smaller analytic type organizations into their own portfolio.

05:53

We've even seen some of the largest manufacturers of tech being bought by huge organizations. With that we actually see opportunities. But we also see risk, and we've seen it with the largest end customers that have got well-established relationships with certain technology organizations and they feel that, okay, we see risk in that we don't know where you're going to land. We know that you're on the market, you're up for sale. We also know that we have no control of who will ultimately own you in the future and that they may do their due diligence on certain types of organisations and think, okay, well, we choose not to work with you or we choose to work with you, as we don't know who's going to own you in the future, we have to put you in the risk bracket. What's the sentiment from your side of the business? How do you feel that organisations see the landscape and how it's changing in terms of consolidations?

06:46 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

I think it's super interesting and I think it probably makes sense to come at this with a more of an IT mindset than a security mindset, and I think maybe we'll come on to cybersecurity. So what I don't mean is that, you know, we should forget all about security and don't worry about it and everything will just take care of itself. I don't mean that at all. I mean more being open to collaborating with lots of different companies across that kind of competitive spectrum. You know, I talk a lot about what I call co-opetition in partnerships. Competition is a spectrum right, because and I think that's not again, that's not the traditional view, you know. You see, if you see someone that is somewhat competing against you, that's it. You know we're shutting the door, we're not going to talk to them. They must be terrible people doing awful things. You know, we should never, ever even enter a discussion or, you know, stand in the same room, and that's not a really very sensible approach because, yes, even with our strongest technology partnerships, our deepest, longest technology partnerships, there is an element of competition. As the markets consolidate and companies grow, they're going to evolve their technology offering right. So you might find that you suddenly start overlapping. I would call it overlapping rather than competing with a partner, and you have to manage that.

08:14

But I talked before about research that was done in this area, where I don't have the stuff in front of me so I might have the numbers not quite right, but it was very, very clear when they surveyed a number of different companies across different sort of technology sectors life sciences that some felt their company was handling competition in a proactive way, whereas others, you know, frankly, didn’t.

08:42

And also the ones that were performing well, surprise, surprise, were the ones that were handling it proactively. And I think that's the key word. I'm not suggesting that again you should sort of pick up the phone to your number one competitor and say, hey, let's get around the table and figure out how we can work together, because you know the more of an overlap there is, you know there's obviously companies that are almost completely overlapping and 100 competition. Of course you shouldn't try to collaborate with those guys, or certainly not, not as a first priority, but managing that friction, that, that that overlap. If you can do it well, then I think you'll be more successful than, frankly, those that work on human instincts to sort of pull away and not have those discussions. But again it's kind of risk management. You know it's being sensible, it's managing things in a good way, basically.

09:42 - Steve Kenny (Host)

Even if you just take a reflection and a snapshot in time over the industry as a whole, we can see and there's enough evidence to suggest that those that have taken the closed protocol slash proprietary systems and we don't want to work with anybody.

09:53

We're going to keep it all to ourselves. They don't survive and, whether or not it provides unnecessary competition, they don't want to work with people commercially. Whatever that is ultimately the final decision makers at an end user level within procurement. They want to safeguard their systems. They want to invest in systems that are going to last, you know, 7, 10, 20 plus years, depending on what the type of technology is. So I think that ease of interoperability and integration and actually working with potentially your competitors or your future technology providers is really important. Industry trends as a whole how do you feel that that is starting to impact it, so obviously, as an industry within security, we're talking around the value of cloud applications. We're talking around things around artificial intelligence. If we look at the evolution of analytics and where it was 10 years to where that is today, what's your thoughts on how that is starting to, I guess, shape the industry as a whole?

10:57 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Sure, yeah, there's a lot there. I mean, maybe if we start with the one that's finally making a big impact in the industry, which is cloud, right, and certainly I'm surprised it took as long as it did for the famous AI artificial intelligence to get mentioned, because that's normally what comes straight into the conversation and I think there's a lot of confusion and misconceptions around that. But we'll come back to that. I think, coming back to cloud, we do. I think it's pretty much agreed, you know whoever you talk to in the industry.

11:33

Again, I'm focusing more on the video surveillance industry now, but this is definitely having big impacts in wider sort of tech collaborations. But if we start with the kind of core video surveillance business, it's fairly widely reported that the acceleration is already happening. Right, the shift from on-prem to cloud and all the forecasts are that that adoption is likely to accelerate. I still think there's surges forward and then customers maybe take a step back. There's all the different myths and concerns that are out there and some of them are not all myths. There is bandwidth constraints. But the technology obviously keeps advancing and I think, whether it was the pandemic or what it was, that's obviously shifted. More and more business applications, companies are running more and more of their back end in the cloud, so of course that shift to do more and more in there, including video surveillance does seem to be, for sure, picking up now. So I see that continuing, I think, the actual pace in the end will. It will be a very long process, right, because there's so many different customers out there with different requests and requirements.

12:55

I think the important thing for companies in the industry is to be able to offer different options for customers so that they can, first of all, if you're a technology provider and you, you can offer all the different options, then you know you've obviously got a bigger market to reach and, second of all, you know you're going to be able to meet the customers requirements as they are today and as they evolve, rather than trying to sort of pigeonhole them into, you know, a particular offering.

13:27

hink about that, it took from: 1996

14:13 - Steve Kenny (Host)

I think the whole cloud discussion is a really interesting one because it is something that isn't new to the industry. I think it's a lack of understanding. I've seen firsthand where people have spoken around oh, our business won't adopt cloud because and they gave you a whole host of reasons. And then you ask, okay, well, do you use Outlook, do you use Salesforce, do you use, what's your accounting software? Things like that it's all in the cloud. So if someone is brave enough to tell me that their video going to the cloud is more important to them than their financial data, their customer data, all of the important business intellectual property that they own, then that is absolutely crazy.

14:53

But I think, as we're starting to see the decision makers move from well, traditional, old school physical security type practitioners and we're seeing a greater level of involvement and influence from IT, we will start to see the early adopters benefit and we'll start to see the adoption move towards the cloud. But yeah, I agree we're not quite there yet and we've got a long way to go, but it is certainly something that will be on the horizon. And just picking up on what you also said, AI, and I agree it did take us a while to get into the AI discussion. It is something that I feel has been heavily oversold over the past five plus years. Not all applications need to be artificial intelligence, but there is a lot of value in that discussion and I guess front and center of that is technology partnerships. No one organization can do it themselves, so we can benefit from a wider stakeholder model from technology.

15:50 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

With our new or relatively new technology partner program that we introduced a couple of years ago. We've obviously been monitoring the different types of companies coming into that and again a colleague of mine pointed out recently actually the companies is probably, we’re probably seeing more companies coming in that are talking about being AI focused and not necessarily the traditional sort of security industry partners. And that's, that's again shifting us, you know from that core video surveillance, video security business into these different types of use cases and I think AI, or artificial intelligence and deep learning and all of those things that are technically becoming more and more mature. Of course, that opens up a whole new world of opportunities when it comes to integrations at different levels. Again, going back to the cloud, I think the combination of those two things is quite relevant. Obviously, being able to you know all the different training models, all the different things that the big IT companies around our industry are moving forward with this is, for sure, opening up lots and lots of new opportunities, and you know you can do amazing, cool, surprising things with technology, and the challenge is not what you can do technically, it's how do you then take that to market in an, you know, an ethical way, in a sustainable way in a way that can actually be worked and supported for customers, and we've had huge learning before anyone talked about AI, working with lots and lots of smaller analytics partners and being able to support them all over the world, and those challenges are still there.

17:37

I think some of what's being done with the technology that makes it easier to install, easier to integrate, all of those things kind of become more automated. That also makes the adoption of that technology more available or applicable for different types of customers.

17:54

So I definitely think there's huge opportunities there right now and coming, but there is still some of the challenges that were there before, you know, in terms of working with smaller developers that have really cool technology but being able to support that in multiple markets at the same time.

18:12

That's still a challenge and I also think, because of all the different integration capabilities again, whether that's running models in the cloud or whether you're doing some on the edge, some on a server, you know, all of these things present new opportunities, but they also present new layers of complexity that have to be figured out, and I think I've definitely seen that as a challenge, you know, for for small developers, which path do they choose? Because they've only got so many resources and if they go all in on edge or all in on server or all in in cloud, they probably need to do a combination of those three and obviously that's a challenge for them to to sort of decide where to put their investment and resources. And and similarly for us. Actually, you know, with the big cloud providers there's lots of interesting stuff going on, but again, it's choosing where to sort of invest your time and resources I think is the biggest challenge when there's so many different things that you can do.

19:10 - Steve Kenny (Host)

It's interesting that when you look at that in isolation, where one organization might look to invest and what is right for that organization, what I did see a number of years ago is where someone had done some form of an analysis on, say, edge-based technologies and the value that it adds beyond.

19:30

So if you were to acquire a camera and you see the sensor and then you look at the the level of research and development, if you look at one organization in isolation, it might just be hundreds of millions of dollars each year. But if you look at the open platforms and capabilities, you might find that you got 5,000 other organizations that can write some form of software or technology that can sit in a device. But when you start to add all the different pieces of ____ to that organization, you may find that something has gone from hundreds of millions into billions of dollars that is being invested in a solution that is added into a device or a sensor. And that's where the real value is seen, because you've got hundreds, if not thousands, of companies all creating brand new, sophisticated technologies that can, can add value to an end customer. And I think that that is an interesting point that when we see, the true value of openness is seen by hundreds and hundreds of organizations working together

20:35 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Yeah, absolutely, if you can, it's getting that orchestration right between all the different companies, between the different protocols, technologies, ways of working, and I think you know, over time the market figures it out for itself, right, because you know different companies or customers try different solutions and you know some of them fail and go away or you know they're too early, right, often companies come with fantastic new, innovative ideas, but again, having it adopted, having the right support, having all of those pieces in place so that it actually succeeds in the market, you know you don't always get everything right from a timing point of view, but again, I think we see things that came and maybe didn't, weren't successful in the first cycle, as the adjacent technologies around them improve and develop, then those solutions kind of come back and the customer adoption starts and then you kind of get that I don't know that snowball effect, but that maturity and adoption really starts to enable companies to invest more and more, and then obviously it becomes more mature and you're onto the next thing basically.

21:38 - Steve Kenny (Host)

So it's an interesting one. So we're going to revisit the conversation earlier. So, if we look at opening up new markets we've spoken around the likes of smart cities in past episodes, we look at smart buildings. We look at how technology can add real value in terms of business optimization, industrial optimization, things like that. Now we're not talking security anymore, we're talking about technology sensor. We are opening up a whole new plethora of technology organizations to new businesses that we've never seen or we've never heard of before. How do you see the direction of travel there?

22:15 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Again, it's a bit like the technology discussion, like the potential is endless, which is super exciting. I think the challenge with that is that you can potentially become a bit unfocused, because it's like everything is a potential opportunity and then if you try and develop everything all at once, you're not going to get very far. So I think it's about finding some specific use cases that there's a really good fit and ideally and this is maybe a bit of a challenge because you know, often each end customer's particular use case or need is slightly different. So I think finding that kind of killer app, as I've heard it called, you know that's the next big thing.

22:59

Or again, if we do more than just cameras, right, but that's a core part of the business axis and I think if you think about video or the way I try and think about it is, you know, obviously we've humans have got our eyes for more than just checking if someone's about to come and attack us or, you know, steal our wallet. So we use our eyes for much more than security. And the same goes for using cameras. Basically it's using automation of vision basically. So, of course, we've seen a lot of use cases for monitoring industrial applications and they've been super successful, and I think the trick is to then say, okay, well, we've had this successful use of the technology over here. What similar applications are there that we can also introduce this to? And I think that's a way of evolving these different solutions in a kind of scalable and sustainable way.

24:00 - Steve Kenny (Host)

Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting. I saw or I heard a retailer say, “I need to sweat the assets,” and essentially what he was saying is I know that that camera is going to provide me an image for security, but what else is it going to deliver? And he was looking at people counting applications. They were looking at, you know, occupancy levels and all of the different pieces of data that they were getting out of that application was absolutely incredible, and that is where he got his colleagues to pay for those surveillance technologies. What do you see as a potential risk by opening up and creating all of these partner programs or technology innovations? The one for me is where people talk around the cybersecurity risk and I've always been able to mitigate that by saying closed protocol systems do traditionally have more vulnerabilities in. You've got less people looking at these systems, you've got less opportunity to identify the risk, whereas open systems from a cybersecurity are statistically more secure and people are quite shocked by that. Are there any other areas that you think well these are some of the considerations?

25:08 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Obviously, the main challenge that all the technology companies have to handle when it comes to open systems is the cybersecurity aspect. But I, I think because everyone, or most at least of the reliable and trustworthy vendors or manufacturers, because they've recognized for many, many years that that's an area that you have to really, really invest in, you know, to make sure that from your point of view, from your device, from your software, from whatever that perspective is, you are ticking all the boxes from a cybersecurity point of view. And then the integration between the two, and we've done lots of work with different technology partners to make sure that the system is fully secure to you know, different levels. So sorry to kind of just reconfirm what you said, but I still think that's probably the area that we need to continue to focus on because it, you know, potentially, or at least logically, you can understand if it is open to integration. It's open to, you know, potentially, the bad actors.

26:15

But I think the alternative, which you know, is to everyone just have their closed systems. It's kind of proven that that doesn't work. So I think everyone in the ecosystem or the community that's developing these technologies has to, you know, invest and I think the important thing is for the customers to kind of do their due diligence because I think, again, kind of ethical and reliable and sustainable companies will be open, you know, will be open about critical vulnerabilities, will publish, you know, because it things are going to happen right in this complex world. It's how you react to them. That's the most important thing. And, again, being open when something happens and reacting to it quickly. So maybe you can help me think about some other aspects to this.

27:02 - Steve Kenny (Host)

I think the big one, it still has to be the consolidation that's going across the market. It's just not knowing that when someone brings something out, it's new, exciting, it's going to deliver some true value, then where would that company potentially land? There's always organisations that are looking to acquire technology companies. That's the, the only one that I see some of our biggest end customers speak about. We, they like innovation. You know it's, it's nice and it's shiny and they want to invest in it. But they also know that when it's nice and it's shiny and it's going to add value, that a bigger organization might come and acquire them in the future. And they sometimes think, well, what's the level of tie-in that we have to that if we choose not to work with them in the future?

27:47 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Yeah, I don't have any magical solution for this. I think it is all about, you know, doing the due diligence, if you like, looking at the track record of the company. But again, as you say, a lot of the new innovations coming from startups, of course they don't necessarily have a track record, so I think you know, then maybe it's about balancing where you test that technology out. Um, yeah, there's, there's no kind of secret weapon, I don't think. I think it's. It's all about, again, working with open companies, companies that are happy to share information with you as a customer, obviously showing you where the installations have been successful up until now. And again, I think it's because of this emergence of this, again using another buzzword, digital transformation. But I think it's important because it actually changes the dynamic in how we see technology partners, traditionally right, we sort of see that the ecosystem, as you've got the end customers, you know, you've maybe got the system integrators, you've got the different technology partners that work together to sort of ensure interoperability, and then the system integrator, you know, takes the combination of solutions and delivers it at an end customer and yeah, there you go.

29:02

Obviously, what we're seeing now with the digital transformation is that every company is doing that right. Every company's on its own digital transformation for its own internal purposes, same as access is same, as all companies are to varying degrees. And then actually you can find that your end customer is your technology partner. And how do we manage that? You know, it's not fully mature, for sure, but I think that that also presents a whole new world of opportunities with different players in the ecosystem.

29:37

And I've heard this from, from some colleagues that are working closely with our big end customers, that the ones that they actually appreciate working with the most are where perhaps they do see themselves in a partnership because, yes, they are effectively buying the solution, so they're the customer. But I think about, maybe many years ago, working with certain customers, you know, with a buying department that you know spend all their resources doing, you know, reverse auctions to get the best possible, lowest possible price. That's fine, you know, trying to commoditize everything. But you’re not going to get a lot of innovation out of that, right so the other end of the scale, which I think is happening more and more, particularly with innovative customers is they see themselves as part of that collaborative process, and I think of course, you need to pick the right partners to work with. But I think that's when you really see the potential with technology where the customer sees itself as a partner in a solution with other technology companies. I think there's a huge opportunity there.

30:42 - Steve Kenny (Host)

It's always interesting when we look at the internal arm wrestle between those that are actually going to use the technology in the solution and those that are procuring the technology. They've got slightly different motivations, which ultimately changes the behavior of the process, so that's always quite an interesting one. I quote an end customer and he said, “trust will be the only differentiator of the future,” and part of that was to build genuine partnerships with their supply chain, because they needed to trust that what they were doing in terms of innovation was right. They needed to trust them from a cybersecurity point of view, and they built a strong and lasting relationship with their suppliers and they see them as partners.

31:21

So, just to wrap up and I'm mindful of time, if you have one little snippet and one little takeaway that you could share with the audience today, what would that be in terms of the value of partnerships?

31:33 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

If we're talking about technology partnerships in particular, it's having that open approach, being open-minded again, even to work with companies that you might see as somewhat competitive to, to have to have that open mindset.

31:52

The openness with the technology obviously needs to be there as well, but having that open mindset, I think, is the number one uh takeaway I would encourage people to have in combination with what you just said really. It's, you know, just challenging the way maybe we're programmed from a survival point of view to, to operate, to really challenge that way of thinking because, again, you know, from the research that I've heard about and seen and from the work that I've done the past 10 years or so, the more open you can be with your partners, to your point, I think trust is, in the end, what it's all about, right? And I think being open, being transparent, you know, being clear where you do work well together but maybe where you don't, you know, because I think a lot of people don't like to have that conversation, let's not mention that because it's a bit sensitive. I think, obviously don't go in there all guns blazing and kind of upset people, but be open to have those kind of tricky conversations as well, to find the place that it does make sense for you to work. But I think it's all about being open, transparent and trustworthy, basically.

33:02 - Steve Kenny (Host)

Absolutely, Jamie. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and insight with us today. I think it's clear that being able to work with technology partners adds true value to both our network of customers and, ultimately, those that are having to operate these systems, and I'm sure that the audience today will take in a great deal of insight from the discussion. So, Jamie, thank you very much and I look forward to discussions with you in the future.

33:33 - Jamie Donald (Guest)

Cheers, Steve. Absolutely. Appreciate the opportunity. Take care. All the best.

34:02 - Steve Kenny (Host)

Thanks for tuning in to Security Tech Talk. If you've enjoyed today's episode, be sure to check out the other episodes for more insightful discussion and expert perspectives. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss an episode. This podcast is brought to you by Axis Communications. Axis enables a smarter and safer world by creating solutions for improving security and business performance.