 Welcome to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another great episode of Security Matters Hawaii. Today we're talking Arkelyce, which you don't know what that is yet, but we're talking with Sarah James. She's the Enterprise Business Dev Manager for Arkelyce. Sarah, welcome to the studio. Thank you so much for coming in. Hello. Yanked her off the beach. She thought she was going to have a nice day at the beach, and I got her working. So thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it. My pleasure. My audience may not know you. A lot of the people in the industry will, but our audience in Hawaii may not. So if you just give us a little bit of your history as much as you want to share, you know, don't have to overshare. I know about open source intelligence and all that these days. So give them a sense of your background. So year 17 in the business, I started up my career on the East Coast with an end user background in management information systems. I migrated to the West to live, and that's where I got the startup blog per se. And so more focused on the enterprise of security. But today I am living in a VSAS world in Arkelyce, a spinoff of milestone from the Canon family. And it's been probably the most amazing year of my career. And that being said, you're going to learn about Arkelyce today and VMS in the cloud. Wow. So VSAS. VSAS. Tell them what VSAS is. So as many people know, when you walk through any industry trade show today, we, you'll see cloud, right? And so cloud can mean various things to various product lines. However, we are the first true VSAS where really what we're doing is a managed service on Google cloud platform. And that being said, the journey, so my journey in the past year has been educating on cloud, and you can have hereplay cloud, hybrid, and then you move back to on-prem. And so in this world, a managed service for your infrastructure. And that means that today, most IT teams spend 80% of their time doing patches and upgrades. And now in the world we live in, in most meetings that I go to, there's a shift in the conversation. And that means most IT teams now want to take 90% of their infrastructure off home base and move it to cloud to focus more on the IT technology and the projects that they can use to improve their organization. And so what what Arkelyce offers is a different approach to video management. And it is fully software as a service. Yeah. And that's the thing. I think a lot of people miss, they think, ooh cloud, I've got stuff in the cloud. This is a pure play service. So it's built, you just use it, your cameras stream up, all your storage is happening for you, all your upgrades, all your patch management, everything's managed by Arkelyce and then you just have the user experience you have to worry about on your side. Well, yes. When you're building a pure play cloud, you have a different engineering structure. And one of the most prominent points that I try to articulate in every meeting to a prospect is our DevOps team, all they do is assure that we can get from on-prem to cloud. And that's a different tool set. And we had the opportunity almost two years ago when we spun out a milestone is a clean slate and we're at about 50 engineers, 70 total employees in our beautiful new headquarters in Irvine, but we had a clean slate to build ground up cloud. And they were, the Canon team was a very strategic about letting us move forward with pure play cloud. And now milestone is coming in and we will be hybrid with them. But having that opportunity for a year to focus on a VSAS solution with the core of milestone skyrocketed us to market within a year, which is unheard of. It's amazing. It's been a great journey. What I call, to me, the super rapid development, which is exciting because our industry has been known as the two builds a year, the features you requested three years ago finally get built into this build this year and things just move slow and it's all managed and maintained on servers and in your facility. So my tech spend their time patching and upgrading and going to all of our customers' places with this pure play, right, you've got the ability to take those cameras and just have it managed for you. Absolutely. And so what we employ at Arkely's is agile engineering. And as most of you were at ISC West a month ago, you know, we meet with customers like, well, I really wish I had this. Our CTO is like, well, let me give it a try. And a week later, we can week two weeks depending on the complexity. I don't want to say one week. But we can look at it, scope it, build it and roll it out. And the beauty of the technology is we introduce orchestration and containerization, which I'll break it down for all of us. So when you look at containers, a container is you package the application on libraries and binaries and so it's not OS dependent versus a VM. So VM is operating system dependent. So a video management system, now VM. And so when you employ containers, you can move them around and scale them quickly. And we use Kubernetes, which is the orchestration system for the containers. And that's what you will see in auto updates and hatching. And so for you, as an integrator and a partner, you don't have to plan updates, patches, security fixes, schedule them, review them. What we have is a new term, immutable infrastructure. It's the buzzword now, right? Where we do rolling updates and patches. And so IT folks don't have to worry. And once the folks put it all together, there's a pause and they say, wait a minute. This is taken care of for me. Everything. Everything. And your CSO, CIO, CTO is like, where do I sign? It frees up so much time of updating, patching. And so for IT teams, we are moving into that IT world. Cloud is freeing up resources that we originally thought we had on IT teams to be creative and efficient and move the technology in a direction as opposed to dialing it back 80% of the time and doing patching and upgrading. And so once you get the data into the cloud, we can introduce artificial intelligence and machine learning with those neural networks. And so for the folks that want to learn about artificial intelligence and machine learning, I always break it down where the neural networks, we're building the brain, right? And then we train the brain. So we build a brain and then we send it to university to learn, right? I like that analogy. So we build the brain and then we teach the brain. And so what we're able to do at Arculis is we have a whole team of data scientists, which is the number one most sought after position right now in the workforce. And the data scientists are building algorithms and what that is, is they're teaching, right? Once they build these algorithms, we employ it and then you build and you build the learning process. And so what we've done is we've taken it from an angle of a security camera and then what we do is once we build it, then we train it and that's machine learning. So over time, you learn what's normal, what's not normal. So when you hear artificial intelligence and machine learning, we're not the overlay on a traditional VMS, we're actually pushing that into the cloud and then we're able to expand on that. So over time, our list of analytics will grow, but I always say to people, we're eating the elephant one by at a time. And so we're rolling out, we have six and now we're developing more. And then once that data is in the cloud, we can aggregate it and start building an IoT and we just at ISC spotlighted our ability to now build access control into the cloud. And again, back to agile engineering, our CTO was like, oh, well, should we just try to build it? And again, with our sister companies, we're Canon, the Canon family is very open. And so we started with the access panel to get our feet wet into access control. And so what that creates now is the next level of bringing that data in, aggregating it. So what's the natural progression, the door, the camera, and now you can aggregate that data and have a better idea of what's going on in your organization concept. So it's a unified solution now. And so for our audience, the library she's talking about lives in Google, but when you train that camera on your environment, it takes the knowledge it has and starts to apply it to your environment so that it can learn what is normal for your environment, for the environment that it's viewing. It also is gathering a lot of other metadata from that. It isn't just a person walking where there shouldn't be a person. It's the entire scene itself. It can be classified. And this is, I think, the value that people miss about that so much data crunching. It needs cloud compute. We really can't do that kind of compute in a little processor in a camera, for example. And that's what we term now that you'll hear a lot is unstructured data to structured data. And so we're entering the world of big data. And back to the Google Cloud piece, Google has just been selected in the Native Cloud Foundation as the open standard now for containerization. And so the reason that we selected Google to start is we stress tested all three. But we knew if we started with the orchestration and containerization system that makes the magic happen, we can lift that out and apply it to other cloud platforms because it's going to be the native standard. And so this toolkit, you're going to be able to use in any cloud platform. And the unique part being on the island here is Google has spent billions of dollars creating their own fiber backbone. And that is a tremendous performance enhancement of when you actually leave and go out onto the internet, it will find and route over Google fiber to the data center. And so today we pushed to Iowa, which is their central location. And once you get into the cloud, they'll be naturally like, well, what about redundancy? Google has a triangulation, three data centers, and it's naturally redundant between the three and that conversation goes away. So you're not having to build redundant licensing, redundant infrastructure. It's just a natural flow of the cloud. Part of the fabric. And so the conversation changes to a much lighter conversation when people are like, oh, Google Cloud, I want to bring it back to we're a managed service in that cloud and that is removing the infrastructure that it teams manage. And so when you look at an end user, right, there can be cloud first or cloud initiatives or the simple fact that they don't have it in house and they don't want to worry about it. You know, and so there's there's applications that, you know, as we move further into the cloud journey that we're realizing every day, wow, this is really starting to segment into different, you know, verticals, different use cases. And we live in the cloud every day on our smartphone and the apps. And so it's it's a natural progression and it's much more acceptable, I think now than it used to be. It was very the land of the unknown. So my job is to just break it down. Yeah, so we're talking digital transformation. Sarah James is here for our Achilles. We're going to take a break for one minute. Pay some bills. We'll be right back. Aloha, I'm Wendy Lowe and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from think tech Hawaii. And on our show, we talk about taking your health back. And what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul. Anything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about, whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health, whatever it means. Let's take healthy back. Aloha. Aloha, I'm Cynthia Sinclair and I'm Tim Appachella. We're hosts here at think tech Hawaii, a digital media company serving the people of Hawaii. We provide a video platform for citizen journalists to raise public awareness in Hawaii. We are a Hawaii nonprofit that depends on the generosity of its supporters to keep on going. We'd be grateful if you go to thinktechhoai.com and make a donation to support us now. Thanks so much. Aloha and welcome back to Security Matters. We're with Sarah James of Achilles today and we're going through digital transformation. We've been talking about that, that move off-prem and into the cloud with video, which we were just talking about how a lot for a lot of people is like, ooh, what does it mean? I think you've given us that understanding, you know, for the integrator like me, it means I don't have to worry about your hardware. I don't have to worry about your camera's recording or not recording and you not knowing it and not handling those alarms because you're not paying attention to it on your premises. We get all that. Everything works for you. It's a lot more dependable, a lot more resilient. You talked about the cloud triangle that the Google has built. You talked about being able to move it to different clouds, which I think is important. A lot of people are going to want it in as your environment and with the software that Arkely's has built, you're going to be able to do that. So you've also added access control recently. There's so many different applications that you guys have built out very rapidly. Let's talk a little bit about the use cases. I mean, for me, it was in retail was kind of this first simple play, you know, the banks like Q-Lines are important things. So talk about some of the applications and some of the, you know, the power of cloud that's working. So the most prevalent I'm finding really is this enterprise standardization. And there's a huge amount of risk for it's not the, you know, headquarter building with a thousand cameras, right? For a global organization, there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of remote sites and the cost to deploy and manage a server that client server architecture is too high. And those sites are typically not secured properly. And a lot of the traction and the request for myself are, wait a minute, we can push it out. Once we push, we have an on-prem gateway. Once the gateway is installed, we secure it. No port forwarding, 443. Once that camera is on that gateway, it's encrypted, pushed to cloud, right? And so there's now a use case for remote sites. Your 20 to 30 camera count. But the big, big qualification is bandwidth, right? We're only as good as what we can push out for egress. Fiber would be a beautiful thing. Always synchronous versus asynchronous. So there's a lot of technicalities that we can teach you and the qualifying questions. But your bandwidth, people say, Sarah, how much? Well, it's a calculation, right? And your sweet spot is 10 frames a second, 2 megapixel. And then you just look at all those and you calculate. But the way we've designed it, I mean, I can geek out and I always, every time I'm on a flight, I'm like, can I pull up my portal? I pull up my portal on Wi-Fi. And I'm always able to get cameras up on Wi-Fi on the plane. And so our use cases are cloud-first, remote sites and people that don't want to manage their own infrastructure, meaning. Everybody, everybody, we went through that. So and there's also greenfield opportunities, but there's also brownfield opportunities, meaning, hey, we have a use case. I have theft after hours and I want to run analytics. After hours to say a person enters a region, a vehicle enters a region, send me a text, an email and then an alarm. And once it's in, person enters region, they get a text and email alarm and they're able to respond more quickly than going back and doing a forensic analysis. Because it might be the delivery guy that's supposed to be there, but it might not be. Right, exactly. And so it's not just a cloud application. You can, if you have existing cameras because our gateway is open in our partnership with Milestone, we have all the open DLLs for cameras. So it's not just like proprietary camera to, yeah, camera to cloud. It is any existing camera through on Viv. We do deep development with our sister company access, but you can, if you have existing cameras, you can run a pilot, test it and then make the decision. And so we have a beautiful pilot program. Yeah, that's unique. Let's talk about that, because that's something that they should know. So for those of you who've never had an OOB, which is our, for us techies, it's an out of box experience. So OOB, we YouTube that one. Nice, nice. And so we have an amazing CTO who joined the company about four months ago. This is his fifth startup and he wanted to run a test. And so our out of box experience is down to five minutes. So you can register online. We drop ship you a gateway. Okay. Once the gateway arrives, you'll get a welcome email, which you register into the organization. And once that registration hits, you, you populate an organization within the Oculus cloud. And once you log on, you're in. And so it's probably a one minute process. So there's no software install. You just browse to your URL and you're on. And so when you open the box, there's a great little cartoon and you Mac address IP, I'll get into the internet and you're on. And so it'll scan for the cameras. You pull the cameras you want in. Once the cameras are in, you're recording the cloud. And so people are like, Oh, well, how long will it take? I was like, if your cameras are installed, it's probably a 45 minute process. And you can go back in and tweak your motion settings, your camera settings, your permissioning. Um, we're, we're adding a lot of new features this summer, um, particularly for remote sites, it's, it's a, I call it the bird's eye view. And so when we drill down, now you're going to have a map pop up the map. And so for any, um, system administrator, you can sit in your hotel room, you can sit at your kitchen table, you can sit in your office and just zoom in and drill down and see what's going on in your remote location. And so that's really the attractive piece is once you drop in a gateway, your little marker drops in on the map and you're off to the races. Let's talk about the price of the, of the, of the demo. Experience, the out-of-box experience costs, what is free 99? It's free. Free 99. That's right. So, so 30 days, right? Um, I, I prefer 60. Um, I let, I like to let it run, but 30 days, um, 60 days, it's more for performance. Um, and, and I want to let people run it, test it. Um, I usually want to keep a scorecard. What do you like? What do you don't like? And any, when you're interacting, we do have, um, a chat window for tech support, our wonderful tech support manager, Hanisha. You'll meet her. She's starting to get out in the field. Um, she is online chatting. She takes requests and a lot of our feature requests are coming in through chat, just chat. And what we do is there's no manual. We want it to, to be as simple as, you know, firing up your iPhone. And so what we do is we can also, um, how we built the business was very, um, it was a very, um, thought out process. And so in the background, we can run analytics of the questions that are being asked. And then we say, do we need training or do we need to build a knowledge article? And so we're able to say, Andrew, Andrew's been on here a lot. Does Andrew need to get trained or is Andrew asking legitimate questions? And so once we have enough info, we could write a knowledge base on the topic and then just add it to the libraries. And so it's a really kind of self paced learning environment. And we did it by design to not have, you know, a thousand page manual. And so you're for, for someone like you, you can just kind of train on the fly. And I always challenge people that are installing a pilot, take it out and tell me what you think. And I challenge people. Yeah. And the good thing is, um, you know, whether an integrator or an end user, put this in beside what you've got now, but it'll, it'll run in parallel because it's not going to impact. It's still going to see the cameras. You can run it right on the switch, run it out to the internet and see if this meets your needs. And I think the hybrid question should be visited because there's a lot of folks that may want, um, some of the features or something that are, that they're used to in their older milestone system, or they may want to keep some video on the premises itself because of some, I used to call them like box huggers that just love their equipment. So, but not, that's not a disparaging comment. It's just that, uh, they want that level of control. Sure. So we're cloud, they're like, Oh, but, but you can let some stuff go to the cloud or keep a week on-prem and string the rest to the cloud. If you've got a 90 day requirement of some type, regulatory requirement or one year. So you're not spending all that money on that infrastructure, especially in Hawaii. Electricity is very expensive here to run the box. Absolutely. You have to pay for air conditioning to cool the box. People don't think about the cost of that power. And of course, the hard drives need to be replaced. So getting, to me, getting that video off the premise and into the cloud is one of the first things you need to think about them, all the stuff you're doing with it to drive business intelligence is off the hook. So great segue, voice a customer. We have a new feature and it's use case. And so if something happens. So let me back up. Well, like, OK, how do I license? How do I prices? Two weeks, 30 days, 45 days, 60 days, right? You're going to know when something happens. And if you, what we call use case is you pull the video from what you need. And then once you, you build the use case, we push it to cloud forever. And so that's a safety net for people that are like, I want it for a year, but we can push use case, we store it and it's in the cloud forever until you pull it back. And with hybrid, we built our whole platform off the mark milestone, excuse me, video core. And when you look at our smart client, which is a thick client, which is very important for a cloud application, we built that. So it's going to have the same look and feel as milestone as we integrate into the platform on our roadmap. And so we built the cloud and now we're going to integrate with milestone to be the true hybrid. Awesome. This is amazing stuff. If you haven't gotten enough today, Symposium for a safer Hawaii is going on tomorrow all day at the Pacific Club. Sarah is going to give us another lesson, maybe a little deeper dive. She'll be there coming up, pick her brain. Really appreciate you tuning in today, Sarah. Thank you so much for joining us and we'll see you guys soon out there. Aloha.