Intelligent video provider eyes first U.S. office

December 9, 2004 NEW YORK - Branching out from its headquarters in Australia, intelligent video provider iOmniscient has opened its first office here. The New York office allows the company to address sales opportunities in North America, which according to Rustom Kanga, chief executive officer at the company, is the “world’s largest market.” “Our strategy in the United States is to set up a reference site and then to essentially establish channels for selling in North America,” he said. Since it launched its intelligent video product in May 2003, the company has operated out of its Australian location. Even with it being based outside of North America, the company had no problem partnering with companies with 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,” Kanga said. 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 1Q-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 your cope with very busy scenes and challenges like that in CCTV that traditional motion detection systems cannot handle.” For more on this story, see the January issue of Security Systems News.