 Think Tech Hawaii, civil engagement lives here. Welcome to the Think Tech studios. This is Security Matters Hawaii and I'm with Gary Thomas today. We're going to get into some cloud video. We're going to get into some artificial intelligence. We're going to get into some neural networking. We're going to push him as far as he's allowed to. He is the sales director for North America with a company called Arkulis. This is a first for Hawaii to hear about Arkulis, so Gary appreciates coming in. Yeah, Andrew, thanks for having us. Absolutely. Thank you for having us. No worries. I'll start with this one question I like to ask everybody. What keeps you up at night? You're an industry veteran, man, so what worries you? What keeps me up at night, if it's not flying on red-eye flights, that keeps me up. But no, on a professional note, I think a couple of things. One is how do we make our environment or our world a safer place, right? You look around, it seems like every few weeks you've got some sort of shooting going on at one of our schools. That's obviously, it's horrible, and so the other thing is Arkulis, we're bringing to market a disruptive technology, right? So video cloud IoT as a service is changing the industry from a technology market. So keeping me up is how do we bring this to market? How do we educate customers, right, about the value proposition of moving video to the cloud, why it's more secure, and just, we're at a point right now, we're in stealth mode, but we are bringing it to market in beta now and launching it October 1st. So it's just, how do we educate customers on the product? So you have a small market, just North America to deal with. North America. Do you have South America? Yeah, we do. Did you get a small travel plan? We're focusing on North America. Good. So let's give our audience a little bit of your background, it'll be your history on the industry, you know, kind of the last 30 years now, I don't know whatever. Yeah, so just a little about myself, been in the technology sales industry for 25, 26 years, 12 years in the IT space, and then the last 13 years in physical security. A lot of background in startups doing video analytics early on, and then more recently with a company called Milestone, which is actually a market leader in an IP video manager platform. And our company was actually spun out of Milestone Archleys, it's actually a sister company in Milestone. So I joined our company, Archleys, November last year. Awesome. Yeah, Milestone's one of the big ones, 30%, 40% market share globally? Yeah, I'm not sure the exact market share, but there are worldwide market leaders for like 10 straight years. It's a Canon company. It's one of our favorite products, and for those of you who don't know our industry in particular, last year Canon printers, Canon copiers bought Milestone, they also bought Access, one of our biggest video players globally, I think the market leader globally. And now we've got them working on a, what I believe will be an industry leading sort of cloud based video platform. So we'll get into that a little bit too as well. So thanks for coming out. First of all, Gary's came out here to do a show for us. We have our symposium for SAFE for Why He's Going On Up the Street, so he's going to be on stage in just a little bit, but we got him here in the studio earlier this morning. So if you've got some questions, we do have a phone number that's, I think, I don't know if you have to zoom in on that, Ray, but if you want to call in, do that. It's a new feature for the studio, so we're definitely able to take your call. And I want to get to you kind of soon about sort of the history of Archleys. So a little more like your passion for coming from Milestone, which is this industry leader, and I know you were there a while, and they have great stuff going on at Milestone. So what would you think if we said, wow, you know what, this new Archleys thing cloud, what made you want to go there first before we sort of get into the specifics of Archleys? Yeah, so good question. So I think when I was at Milestone working in Silicon Valley, I started talking to customers. You know, Archleys was actually a division of Milestone for seven years. It was the incubation lab that basically developed new technologies and then handed off to product management. So a year, a little over a year ago, I started looking at what the incubation team was working at. They're looking at video cloud. So I started talking to all my customers and started asking, are you guys looking at cloud initiatives? Right? Sure. And what I found out was probably 90% of my customers were looking at moving video to the cloud sometime. Maybe not today or six months, but you know, whether it's 2018, 2019, 2020, they're all looking at initiatives. How do we move our physical security up in the cloud? How do we do it securely? How do we reduce IT operations costs? So I think that was a driver for me. I see. So I really started hyper-focusing on what Archleys was doing, actually the incubation team at the time. And then the formation of the company was, so the time the incubation team with the milestone had 10 employees, I think six developers. And they had Andreas Peterson, who's our CEO, went to talk to the milestone board directors or executive team, I should say, about what they're doing and they had an idea of how to dominate the video cloud IoT market, right, from an enterprise perspective. And so, you know, we need 35, 40 developers. Wow. And at the time, Michael... They went, what? Yeah, exactly. You know, the executive team said, well, we budgeted, you know, two more engineers for you in 2018. So, but Lars Tengard, who's the CEO at Milestone and Andreas, you know, came up with ideas like, well, we should spin out this group into a separate company. So they actually went to Canon, the parent company of Milestone and pitched it. Canon executive said, we love it. We think the cloud is the future. And what do you need? Wow. So... Wow. Blank check? Not quite a blank check, but, you know, they funded us for three years. And now we are, today we're sitting about 65 employees. We've got 45 developers on a team. We are a cloud-first company, Peer Play Cloud, and we're charging forward. So it was a brilliant move by, you know, Andreas, the Milestone executive team at Canon. Look at the big picture. Otherwise, we're an incubation team that has a few developers focused on it. And we're kind of dipping our toe in the water saying, hey, we're cloud, right? But this way, being a company, we can hyper-focus on being a cloud-first ground up, right? We're doing something that's disruptive and changing the market. Yeah. And then for those of you who aren't sure, you're thinking about this for yourselves, there's a few models. You know, you've got your VMS, your standard classic model that's on-site. So you've got costs for maintaining hard drives, which burn up about every 10,000 hours, unless you use the enterprise class, which burn up about every 30,000 hours. Regardless, you've got to replace those. They go down. You're missing video. And then you've got the bandwidth connectivity that it takes to get to your video. And maybe you've got holes poked in your firewall, so there's less security for doing mobile-type things with something that's home-based. And you've got the sort of hybrid solutions where some people have got some stuff on-site and they've got some stuff in the cloud. And then you've got the pure cloud play, which has been, there's been a few players in it. There's a couple of people trying it, but no one on the level of milestone has come at this yet and said, wow, actually, I should say the level of canon and said, we'll take some resources like this, dedicate it and build a box. So we're all, you know, in the industry, folks like me are all chomping at the big one. Woo, when do we see it? When do we get our hands on it? I'll sneak a little beta, so I've got a little bit of it, but it's good stuff. Yeah, I've been playing with it. So how did you decide finally to say, you know, I'm going to go full-time? So once they said they're going to fund it, they could afford to hire some folks and get you in there? Because you've been at the top of the industry for a while in your other roles. Absolutely. So had you taken on anything brand new before? Yeah, I've done a few startups in the past. So I worked at Agent VI, which is an analytic company back in 2006 and 2009, and also brought BriefCam to market in 2010. So I helped them launch the product in the United States back in 2010, which actually is an interesting thing. And Canon just bought BriefCam? Canon just bought BriefCam, a market leader in video synopsis technology. So that's now Canon accompanying, I think, somewhere down the road. Smart purchase. Yeah. And, you know, somewhere down the road, we'll hope to see BriefCam integrated with Arch-a-Lease product. Oh, sure. Without a doubt. Yeah. I mean, it works so well. And it works well anywhere you use it. And if you're not familiar with that, just go to the website. Check it out. Awesome. So let's talk a little bit about the benefits. Let's look at... I touched BriefCam on some of the architecture, you know. You've got on-prem, you've got hybrid, and then you've got totally off-site. Let's talk about some of those other benefits there. Now, in Hawaii, we have a super high cost of electricity. So running those machines is a piece of that ROI. What else do you see as a return on investment for people offloading video out to the cloud versus keeping it on-prem? Well, so we talk about, I like to talk about total cost of operation. People think that TCO is total cost of ownership, but it's really about operation rights. So what the cloud brings to, you know, from a benefit standpoint is reducing that cost of operation from IT perspective, right? So you're talking about one piece of right. There's many elements of that total cost of operation, but when we can push out software updates automatically, right, without scheduling IT resources to do software updates, security patches can be pushed out automatically without scheduling. Sometimes, if you think about an attritional world, we're scheduling weeks out to do a security patch or a software update, right? We're rolling trucks to do software updates, right? It's on-prem. We can't get to it remotely. Absolutely. And, you know, I got customers in the Bay Area that, let's tell you, they spend $1,000, $2,000 a day rolling a truck. And they've got, you know, 100 locations, maybe 500 locations, right? So with the value proposition, we start talking about the ability to do those software updates automatically pushed out without IT operations. We could save them thousands of dollars. Right. And the management piece, obviously, I always get the latest version. And we can also probably do the firmware updates to cameras at some point, right? We'll be able to push those on out through the VMS because we have that capability, which is what we're all looking for, right? It's one thing to have a VMS. It's another thing which is, you know, all that software lives in the cloud. That's awesome for us. But we've got to work on getting those patches out because we have 1,000 endpoints out there. And there's still people driving around updating every camera or going to a site, getting on the network, updating eight here, go to another site, update eight there. I mean, we're... It's another big process. Absolutely. We're trying to simplify the user experience, right? So whether that's the system integrator, IST, or the end user, from a deployment to a day-to-day operation, you know, look at the ArchElease portal, our interface, it's a workflow, right? And much more intuitive than traditional video management platforms from bringing everything under one umbrella. Yeah. So the end users, and they struggle with this, and they actually don't even know. And actually, I have even other issues that I think cloud can help us straighten out is that they don't necessarily look at their video system unless they've had some kind of problem that they want to research. And they may go for days, maybe weeks without seeing it, and something will be offline. Something won't be working, and they don't know. And then they'll try to go in and do their investigation and find out, wow, this thing was offline. And when we've got some cloud activity, we've got a way to get those alerts out to somebody, out to a mobile device, or we can let someone know instead of the thing sitting back there on the desk, you know, we're not paying any attention to it unless you need it. Absolutely. That's a great point. And one of the things ArchElease is doing with our AI logic or analytics is we have alerts pop up for cameras. So if you have a foggy lens, dirty lens, spider on the lens, the camera's been adjusted out of the original field of view, it's been bumped or whatever. Somebody moved it so they can. Yeah, absolutely. Smoke detection. So these are things that basically will notify the end user that the camera has some sort of issue from a quality of video, right, viewing the video, right? And then it can actually you can through the system, the portal, open up a trouble ticket, assign it to a tech, they can go out and fix it, clean it up, whatever needs to be done, and then notify the end user that's it's all been cleared out. So yeah, that usability piece is massive. We're talking about ArchElease. We'll be back in one minute after we pay a few bills. Stay with us. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, your host on Think Tech's likeable science show. Every Friday at 2pm, we delve in the magical, magical, fascinating world of science, how science applies to your life, why you should care about science, what impact science has on you and on those around you, why you need to know some science. It's a fun, interesting, painless way to learn some good science that you can use. See you there. Hello, I'm Dave Stevens, host of the Cyber Underground. This is where we discuss everything that relates to computers that just kind of scare you out of your mind. So come join us every week here on thinktechawaii.com, 1pm on Friday afternoons. And then you can go see all our episodes on YouTube. Just look up the Cyber Underground on YouTube. All our shows will show up. And please follow us. We're always giving you current, relevant information to protect you. Keepin' you safe. Aloha. Hey, welcome back to the Think Tech Studios. This is Security Matters Hawaii. I am talking with Gary Thomas from ArchElease. And we're getting into some of the benefits of AI and business intelligence for cloud applications. What's your vision? What do you think we're going to accomplish with this stuff going forward? From an AI perspective, we look at our platform, right? We're actually aggregating sensor data. That could be video sensors being cameras, IoT sensor data. It's aggregating that and correlating that information into either business intelligence or more security applications. So if you look at business intelligence, look at a big box retailer. You can look at an NCAP. Say we got GoPro sittin' on an NCAP and a big box retailer. Now we can, from a business intelligence, start providing information that shows traffic flow, pass an NCAP, and we can tell you how many people actually walk by the NCAP over eight hour period. So over eight hours, 1,000 people walk by. Nobody bought any. Well, that's a problem. Well, that's correlated back to the point of sale, right? But you can take that data and say, OK, over that eight hour period, 1,000 people walk by, but 200 people stop, pick up the GoPro product, and they actually spent two minutes looking at the product. So now we can actually correlate traffic flow, people counting, and dwell time. Dwell time, sure. So from a business intelligence standpoint, and then, of course, security-wise, there's a lot of things that we're doing. We can't get into too much detail. But if you think about what AI can do, if you think about, for an example, go back a couple of decades to the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing situation, right? A situation where AI can be applied there would be a van pulls up across the street, or, yeah, a van pulls up in front of the building actually. Guy gets out of the truck. He runs across the street and jumps into a car heading the opposite direction. Right there, that's an immediate red flag, right? So if you see a vehicle pull up and a guy jumps out, goes in opposite direction, that's a major concern. We all know what happened, of course, with that horrific situation. But that's an example of AI could actually be used to apply some logic and then correlation. Usually the delivery guy goes to the back of the truck and unloads something. He doesn't run away and leave his vehicle, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's not necessarily intuitive. Even a live operator, a human, might watch that to see what's going on before realizing, hey man, the clock's maybe 10, 9, 8, and he really got some problems to take care of. And then the AI, of course, is a force multiplier, right? Obviously. Because in the case of operators, he could be looking at 20 cameras, could be looking at 100 cameras. He might have missed that completely. He's going to miss it, and a good chance, right? So AI brings the ability to do automated, real-time awareness and event notification. And then you figure out what that response is. And so your lab team, so we saw from at MIPS this year, which is the milestone integration partner summit, we saw Tanmay talk to us. Tanmay Bakshi talked to us quite a bit about those neural networks, like some are supervised and some are unsupervised. So are these pieces of the AI tool kit that we could expect to see out at ARCU East in the future? Absolutely. So we have an AI development team that's working on a number of algorithms. I'm not sure what I can actually go into. But they are neural network algorithms, right? So they're learning technology. They get smarter as they're applied in the field, right? And it's correlating that data with seeing it's actually learning. And that's a great thing about one of the reasons we're doing the beta sites right now is by the time we launch, the algorithms have to be much smarter. Sure, so they're pulling in data from an environment. For our users out there, what we're talking about is the ability to have a camera that actually learns what all the things are in an environment. It knows what's a chair, what's a table, what's a human, what's a pet. And then it also knows what's not supposed to be there or what's rarely there or what's only there on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. or whatever. And we can build business intelligence around that kind of knowledge. Absolutely. Once these neural networks learn. And the trick is computing power, which is available in the cloud. Absolutely. You don't have that sitting in your back or your car seat. You don't have people that build out offices. You need massive power for this. And that's another value proposition, right? Is no longer do customers need to make the investment of enterprise class servers sitting on prem, right? That's all moved up in the cloud. That's sitting up in the Google cloud, right? So that's a huge benefit. Another thing if you think about also the problem today with traditional on prem solutions is you have to value engineer that solution to be the worst case scenario from a performance standpoint, right? A peak. So if you think about shopping holidays and you're a big box retailer on Black Friday, right? Biggest shopping day of the year, Black Friday. You have to, from a retailer, process in that video, the analytics, that has to be engineered for that peak performance, right? Yeah, because the rest of the year, you have 10% of that traffic. So you talk about a massive investment from a hardware perspective, right? Sure. Plus IT, supporting all that. So when you move everything to the cloud, with our colleagues, the benefit of the cloud is elasticity, right? We dynamically, the system can dynamically add or reduce processing power based on performance. So now, instead of building that network out and the hardware infrastructure to support the peak performance, we dynamically add processing up and down. Same thing with bandwidth, right? So you're not paying for all that upfront investment. You pay for what you use. Right, so that you're always ready for surges. Yes. Because it can dynamically scale to address the surge, but then you're not paying for all that when you didn't need it. So I equate that to, like, you know how a lot of people think, oh, I've got to store video for 90 days, for example. And then they'll get their storage set up and then they'll slowly decide, oh, if I use less frames, I didn't really need such so much hardware. So they'll start off with like 15 frames. They'll say, oh, well, five frames would have done it for me. That's a similar sort of issue where you don't want to ever over-purchase for the back end of your technology. And cloud's going to allow us not to do that down to the end user. Absolutely. So is the vision for the product a sort of a subscription service, a channel service? What's the? Because this is also new. We're always kind of wondering as an integrator, how are we going to sort of see this package? What do we offer to the customer? What do you foresee? How are you still figuring it out? So whatever you can tell us. So great question. It will be a subscription service pay as you go on a monthly basis. We are changing it from a CapEx investment for customers to an OpEx, right? Very good. So it's a monthly recurring fee. So we're still working through some of the pricing models, but it is on a monthly fee and usage base. And will you be able to think to add Hawks or add in some AI where you needed, like put some AI into this channel for dwell time. And maybe for this channel, this is a big fire. It's a dusty area. So I need to have the fire analytic, but not maybe all analytics everywhere. Or what do you think about that? Yeah. So you'll be able to with the system. And we may have a couple of different levels of a product, an enterprise product, and then maybe a base unit. The base unit, you could Alucard add in AI logic to some cameras, a subset, right? And that's basically going in the portal and turning on and off different devices for those type of features, right? Enterprise may be, you get everything, right? Soon as a new feature update comes out. And the nice thing about our platform, right? Gone are the days of waiting four, six months for the new build, right? And then you got to test it to make sure it doesn't break everything. Yeah, so now we push software updates out. It could be daily, it could be weekly, right? Same thing, security patches. So it's all automated. And what's the vision for working with the camera partners that we have out there? Do you, I know there's on-vift standards and on-vift can be limiting because you can only get the stream. And sometimes you can't control the camera features. So what's your thoughts? Have you guys debated any of that yet? So we will support on-vift. So we'll, you know, they're obviously the massive customer base running on-vift drivers. But also being a spin out of milestone, we're going to be able to tap into, you know, milestone, I'm not sure what it is. They got over probably about 7,000 custom drivers for third party cameras, right? So we're going to be able to tap into a pretty large subset of that number. So out of the gate, you know, if you're looking at, you know, the market leaders and IP cameras, whether it's, you know, Axis, you know, Sony, Bosch, you know, Samsung, or Hemla, go down with us, right? We should be able to support. We always do recommend, you know, with on-vift to test drivers. But, you know, I don't think camera support, if you're using top-tank leading manufacturers, should be a problem. Awesome. That's really good to know. And obviously that can grow a lot easier in the cloud. So adapting, you know, when you get a new library built for a line of camera, because there, those guys are also coming out with new cameras every, I don't know, seems like every six months, we have a new build, which is, you know, probably new firmware from those guys with new feature sets and things like that. So, you know, the ability to push one thing out into your engine that updates all those engines in the cloud, right? It makes it just a one-time thing and all of a sudden everything works. I think there's so much advantage there. And what I, I guess maybe, do you think it's just bandwidth that's finally allowed us to do this? You know, because it's, we've talked about it for a while. But, you know, is it 5G? Is it the, that 5G is coming? Was it 4G? What do you think, tip the scale? Because to me, video cloud, it really works. And I don't see how anyone won't do it in the future. I don't think you would be able to buy anything but cloud, personally. Maybe it's 10 years out, don't get me wrong, but. I think it's a combination. One is bandwidth is obviously there's no issue with bandwidth these days, right? So much more scalable. The other thing is processing GPU processing from like the guys over at NVIDIA that has enabled the AI piece to really be able to handle that deep learning logic and processing because that's very compute intensive. So I think GPU processing, the bandwidth, and then also security. Today, there's no doubt that moving your infrastructure up into the cloud is more secure than a non-prim solution. From a cyber perspective, yes, for sure. Right? So I think those are kind of three key elements. OK. Yeah, I totally agree. I've seen, I've been watching this for a while and there's been a few, again, a few companies that have dipped in. And I'm really happy to see Milestone and Canon fund this because I feel like now we've got a super high tech company taking a look at what's possible. And that is only going to help the industry move further down this path. And hopefully the end users will see the value there. We've still got a lot of guys. In the old IT guys, you remember there's always the picture of them hugging their servers. They don't want to give up their iron, you know? But there's so much more available to us in the cloud. And you put the money in bandwidth and let it live up there, it'll take care of you a whole lot better. Very interesting. So let's talk about the most exciting thing so far. You've sort of been there since a little bit late last year. What's the most exciting thing at Archie Lee's right now? I mean, I know Andreas, I know some of your team. They're great. So I'm sure the folks are fun. What do you guys really stand up and cheer about? I think success. I mean, we have a really great culture. We actually talk about we have a culture of superheroes, really great smart, brilliant people. But really, a bigger picture is what we're doing within the industry. Like I said, it's a disruptive technology. We're changing the industry. We excited when we talk to customers and we understand the problems that we don't want Windows servers to the edge anymore. We don't want to be rolling trucks, right? They look at what we can do. It's like, wow, you can save us thousands of dollars and several hundred thousand dollars in cases, right? Those type of things. And then applying logic from the artificial intelligence, and IoT sensors, that's a whole other element to talk about as an IoT. The things that we're doing is it is really game-changing. We're doing it for the enterprise, right? If you look at other folks out there in the cloud space, they're really focused on small business, right? We're actually the first company in the industry from the cloud, pure cloud play solution that's actually addressing AI, cloud, IoT integration for the enterprise. And the enterprise is always a place to look for a lead. If you want to see where the world's going, follow those guys. Gary, it's a real pleasure having you. Absolutely, thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. We're going to head down to the symposium for a safer Hawaii. I hope you signed up because it's sold out. We'll be down there the rest of the day. Meanwhile, appreciate you joining us at the Think Tech Studios. This is Security Matters Hawaii. And we'll see you next time. Aloha.