Skip to Content

Eye on North American opportunities

Eye on North American opportunities iOmniscient opens first offices here in New York and Toronto

NEW YORK - Branching out from its headquarters in Australia, intelligent video provider iOmniscient has opened its first office here. The New York office, which opened in the second half of 2004, allows the company to address sales opportunities in North America and support the company’s various resellers and OEMs in a sales and technical role. “Our strategy in the United States is to set up a reference site and then to essentially establish channels for selling in North America,” said Rustom Kanga, the company’s chief executive officer. Even with iOmniscient being based outside of North America, it had no problem partnering with companies with sizable market share here such as DVTel, Honeywell and Siemens. Kanga attributes the company’s strong partner channel to its approach to video analytics. “These companies would only work with a smaller company like us if we offered something that was unique and not readily available in the U.S. market.” iOmniscient’s product was developed based on a measure of human intelligence, or IQ rating - the higher the product’s IQ the higher its level of intelligence. The IQ-180, which is the company’s highest level product and was released in August 2004, is capable of detecting changes in background in busy situations even when a human eye is unable to notice the change. “What we developed was a new way of providing intelligence for surveillance systems,” Kanga said. “We started to address issues of how to cope with very busy scenes and challenges like that in CCTV that traditional motion detection systems cannot handle.” The technology was partly developed by iOmniscient and part of it was acquired from an Australian defense research organization in 2001. “We have a very strong product and we hope that it will allow us to grow very significantly in the United States,” Kanga said. “And that will happen mainly through our various partners and resellers.” The company also recently opened an office in Toronto. Currently, three employees serve both North American offices and have a significant role in educating possible partners. “Part of the role of our sales team is to educate the market,” he said. “Many people in the security business do not know what is available and do not realize what else is possible. As they discover it, hopefully, they will benefit from access to the technology and we will benefit from them selling it.”

Comments

To comment on this post, please log in to your account or set up an account now.