 Welcome back to the Think Tech Hawaii studios for another episode of Security Matters. Today we've got a really interesting episode. We're going to talk with Andreas Pedersen, the CEO of Arkelyse. Arkelyse is a just launched cloud-based BNO surveillance, business intelligence application. They're doing a lot with this product, so I'll let Andreas tell you all about that. Andreas, welcome and thank you for joining us today. Thank you for having me. I look forward to telling you all about that. All right, good deal. So I'd like to start off with a question, sort of from a security perspective, and I know you're a super busy guy just launching a new product, but if you could tell me from just a security mindset, what kind of keeps you up at night these days? So, if the two full questions seem from my perspective, one of the reasons why we are doing what we're doing is to make the world a safer place. So from a traditional security perspective, whatever we can do to prevent something bad from happening, that actually keeps me up at night. What more can we do? If we talk from a more IT security perspective, it's always to make sure we are following the latest security procedures and protocols and making sure that we are really securing all the data that we are aggregating. Right on. I believe that. So you had a launch event this past week at Google Next. Amazing. I don't know of another security product that ever launched at Google Next. So I'm not going to pigeonhole it as a security product. We'll get into how broad it is. But how was the launch event and how is the group there at Google Next? So we made a very conscious choice not to launch in the classical physical security industry on purpose. We are more than just video. We are doing a lot of things in IoT. We're doing a lot of things with taking unstructured data, making it structured, correlating this to give basically actionable insights. The week was phenomenal. We had a speaker slot, one of the first days at the show on the IoT track. It was fully booked. The people were even standing outside trying to peek in. There is a little... There is 15 minutes from the presentation you can find online. But like I said, the whole idea is we are so much more than physical security and we want to keep pushing in that direction. And what happened at Google was exactly what we were hoping. A lot of app developers came up afterwards and said, wow, are you really aggregating all this data and how can we be working with you? Wow, that's amazing. So a great response. Did you feel that the audience there understood what surveillance does versus classic IT, big data type solutions? No, they actually do. We were surprised of not only the Google personnel, but all the people attending, how big security or video monitoring actually is. Of course, many of them are coming with a more IoT type of focus, but they have been thinking surveillance cameras and how they can marry together their IoT applications together with that data. So we actually didn't have to explain too much sort of where we're coming from or our legacy. Most people actually knew about it. Interesting. It's funny how the power of video, we've had it for a long, long time. And I think now as everybody starts to take it and look at it as data, all the images and everything that video is capturing, folks such as yourself that understand the value of that see a true progression for our industry finally. Yeah, definitely. And video is sort of the last frontier within big data. I completely believe that. And I think that it is really when we're marrying it with other types of sensor data. That's where you get the real accuracy in it. And that's where it really will kick off. I just want to say as well, one of the reasons why I think it's now is because of I read an article that the cost of running deep learning, machine learning or AIMO things have gone down to 10% of what it was three years ago. Wow. And I think that is, I don't know if I didn't do the source check, but I think I can definitely see the trend. And some of the things Google also announced that this show clearly shows the direction they're driving their cloud platform in. And I mean, as those costs goes down, we gather more and more data. We make more and more sense out of it. We're going to be able to not only make the world a safer place, but allow businesses to basically grow using all that data we provide them. That's awesome. I'm so excited because I've been in this industry a long time and I've not seen anything like we're starting to do now. So for our clients, it's going to be very important. So give my audience a sense of your background. How did you kind of work up through the industry and then sort of end up in the CEO role that you have today? And you share what you can. You don't have to give us whatever you don't want to share. I can do the story very long and I can do it very short. But I was with milestone systems for, I think, close to seven years. I started as a technical product manager. I had probably a new role every year or a new title doing all types of things. And that actually enabled me to go all the way to where we're at today or where I am at today. Because throughout this time, I always focused a lot on what are the customer pain points that the industry haven't resolved yet. And I always had the mindset that every day in the office is a day wasted. And for anyone doing product and tick, they always got to be talking with the customers and figure out what are the problems to be solving. So that is actually how I got here. A good mixture between technology and business. Nice, nice. And so what kind of team do you have primarily engineering? I mean, since you've just launched, I'm presuming you'll get more marketing and stuff going. But what size of team does it take to deliver something like this? You guys haven't been at it that long. Now, so we started less than a year ago. Wow. We were a spin out of both Canon and Milestone. And Milestone is a sister company to us. And Canon has a big share as well, of course. And we based it from all the knowledge we had from Milestone, the marketing side, some of the code as well. And then we have built something from scratch that is a fully cloud multi-tenant solution. And be able to do that, like you said, we really need a team, not only that are willing to just fail fast and move fast, they almost have to be rebel talent and think differently. And when we started in August, we were a handful and we are almost 70 people right now. And primarily, I would say 50 plus our engineer around 50, the rest is go to market. And we are actually ramping up our sales and marketing organization right now. So using this opportunity, if anyone want to join us, let us know. And we are getting a lot of inbound leads, but we're looking for that top 1% to 3% either from a cloud industry or physical security industry to get this amazing culture and company to the next level. Right on. Yeah, I tweeted that on Archie's website, there's a link that says, try it for free. So I'll point that out to people. I know you want to get some folks engaged and get more, you know, the more feeds you get going, the more data you can begin to aggregate, the more you can learn, the quicker the engine will learn, I'm guessing. Exactly, but I do want to emphasize that all the data is the customer's data. We don't get it unless the customer says, now you can have it or I want to share with you. And what we noticed was when we're talking with a lot of our early adopters, they say, well, inside my office, I like to keep the normal day data for myself, but several customers, if they have had an incident, now this haven't happened yet, luckily, but if someone, they used the example, if someone came into my office or came into my hotel holding a gun, I would give you that video footage any day so you can start detecting anyone coming close to the building holding a gun or covering their face or anything similar like that. And so like I said, security and privacy is also key for us. We gotta make sure the customer data is the customer data, but we encourage them, the more they can share with us, the more intelligent we can become, the better they become. Yeah, it's interesting. I think the security community is big on sharing, so as far as those of us that are providers, you might say, and yourself included, and then I didn't really think at first that the end users may have a bit of different concerns about how much that they're sharing. Of course, there's a lot of talk about all the open source intelligence that's been shared with Facebook and things like that of late. So it's really important, I think, that Archulis has taken that position of share what you like, the rest of it, that's your video, but you can share with us what you like. I think that's an important feature. It is a community mind share, and I can tell you at least the early doctors have been really interested in sharing because they know they get the value back. We're working with one of our first customers who is within the hotel or hospitality business, and they wanna do more than just security. Of course, they are interested in understanding how are people, are they going directly for the lobby? Are they going for the bar? How long time do they spend in the bar? And the more data they can share, the better result they get, but they also know that that's not their unique competence and that is to provide a hotel room, so they're still willing to share that data to be used by others as well. That's a good example. Wow, is it, do you work with the Google engineering group as well for their cloud platform, or do you just have a set of specs that you build to, how does that relationship work? There are many touch points. There are technical, business, strategy, and so on, and I have to say Google have been phenomenal in supporting us. So for example, if we take the security and the IT part of things, they are making sure that we have done all the penetration testing, all that we are following security compliance says. They are of course doing it, and they could just say, well, you're on our platform, but you have to do that yourself, but they're giving us experts, and you have to remember that these are the experts that is securing one of the most, if not the most secure public cloud platform, and they're giving us those resources. So phenomenal relationship on the tech side, same on the business side, they give us insights to what they're thinking, they give us pre-alpha access to some of the things they're building, and then especially in one area when it comes to technology they're helping us in is Kubernetes and Docker, and those are very, for people who don't know what that is, it's sort of the latest cloud technologies that allows companies like us to scale beyond what you ever could do if you just take legacy on-prem solution and virtualize it in the cloud. And the reason why they're helping us more there is we are primarily or 95% of our things are running on GCP, but we still have some form of device sitting on-premise and that's just an extended cloud cluster, and that's where we're doing some unique things to make sure that it's always up to date, security patches are pushed out to every site instantly and that the integrator or the end customer, they don't have to think about patches and updates, it's just an extension of always being up to date running a cloud cluster. So there are some things they're really supporting us in and that's, I'm super happy. Yeah, security takes a village. We are gonna talk a whole lot more about Archelies with Andreas Pedersen in just a minute. We're gonna take one break and pay some bills of our own and we'll be right back with you in just about a minute. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host on Think Tech Hawaii of Pacific Partnerships in Education. Every other Tuesday afternoon at 3 p.m., I hope you'll join us as we explore the value, the accomplishments and the challenges of education here in the Pacific Islands. Three teams to smoke will lose years of these moments. It's your life, don't miss a thing. Hey, welcome back to Think Tech Hawaii. This is Security Matters. We're with Andreas Pedersen of Archelies Today. I'm Andrew, the security guy, your host and we are at the future, but it's real of security today with this product. We're talking about Archelies and Andreas, you've built an amazing team up there to get this done so quickly. What sort of style of leadership did you have to sort of get to that launch date this past Tuesday? Yeah, so I just want to emphasize again, we launched, we started from almost nothing. We launched within less than a year using all the latest cloud technologies. Now, I think it can sum up that we have not only built a team that are really experts at cloud as well as physical security. We have also built a team that is very diverse and we have done that on purpose because like I said, the mindset is that we want to keep listening and working with our customers to understand their pain points. And that means we got to move very fast. We got to make sure we deploy new things every other week. We got to make sure our customers knows exactly what we're doing and work very close with them. Just some diversity and what I mean with that because I believe diversity creates innovation and some of the people we have on the team are we have engineers or developers. One is a lawyer, one is a medical doctor, one is a biologist and then we have normal developers that are just hip hop YouTube stars or something like that with millions of followers. But we are really trying to do something that allows us to quickly innovate for all what the customers are looking for. And I want to say the three mantras we have is design thinking at the core and that's a very, how do I say, improp, fail fast, fail forward, you just have to sort of get whatever you have on your mind and structured out there and then don't hold back anything. So it is the design thinking, it's the fail fast and then we have a very open and flat hierarchies. Everyone sits in an open landscape, no one have their own office, everyone speaks very open and direct, give one another feedback. And I've sat in situations where we have a problem in the morning and it's deployed to production after lunch. There was a new feature idea and one week later I can try it out and it's pushed all the way to production and that's not a typical style of how the security industry normally do things. And yeah, we're gonna keep innovating at that speed. That's the goal and that's what the team is set up for. That is truly amazing. So I did, is it mostly a West Coast team because you're an Irvine or have you been attracting global talent? I'm sure folks that are talented are interested in that type of an environment where they can get their ideas out, bounce them around and if they're good ideas, they get to work on them and if not, you know, let's get something else going. We have the headquarters down in Irvine. We have internationally, we are very diverse as well. Oh good. People, I'm from Sweden. We have people from, of course from Denmark considering one of our sister, or milestone and some of the people coming from there. We have people from Bulgaria, people from Russia, people from all over the place that have either been in US or we have relocated them here and it's working out phenomenally. The respect for one another is amazing and like I say, the very flatness. People come up to, I mean, they go up to me and it's like, hey, Andreas, I think you were, sorry for my language, a jerk in this situation and here is why and I was like, okay, thank you for telling me. I appreciate that, now I can work on it and that's the attitude everyone have and it's working really good. It's gonna be interesting to see where that takes us. We move very fast. Wow. I don't keep track on everything even to these states. It's impossible. So that being said, so you know, our industry is one that is forever has been, I think for less and less cost giving customers more and more features, right? It's kind of been the track and of course, I talk a lot about how we left security out of true firmware security and development security, IT security out of a lot of that product, which is why it was so cheap. The features that you're gonna be able to offer since you've already got this really secure platform to build on and really secure methodology for building, what do you expect to show us? What are the differentiators you think that Arculis is going to sort of drive with? So I think we push more security and forensic will always be there and we need to sort of baseline that that we need to have good enough. The more data we aggregate and it's not only video data, it's any type of device, building management data, IoT data and the more we can correlate that to build intelligence for augmenting basically operators or security guards, but more importantly, the more we can push out to a more business solving solution, the more we're gonna pivot into something else. Video or video will always be the primary sensor, but we believe we're gonna be capable of doing so much more than that. Okay, it looks like our video may have frozen there, so I've got a still up of you now anyways. We're gonna keep this going. So you are, I've got some early adopters in there already and do we have pricing? Is this, are we available to the public? Are we ready for consumption? I guess is the question. So what we did now to Google Next is we commercially launched, whoa, now the whole meeting fell down on me, but let's keep going if you still have me on voice. Yeah, I have audio. Okay, now we're back. So what I was saying is that we commercially launched at Google Next. We are ready to take on customers and so on. We will be GA-ing later in the third quarter and the reason why we separate the two is now we want to learn even more from the customer and establish a very close relationship with the first customers, make sure they are doing great and then we keep adding more. That's one reason. The other reason is that we, the more data we can collect now in the next coming months, the more we can offer our customers at GA at a better value. So more feature for more value. And the third is we are focusing on North America and we want to turn on one data center at the time. I do want to give a shout out here that our latency is close to a second, which is more or less what you get from on-prem. And when I say latency there, it's from a camera to our little cloud connector all the way up to Google Cloud. It's stored in the cloud and we retrieve it back down in less than or around a second. So anyone who is doubting that cloud is not ready for video surveillance or insights and even more, I have to say they're wrong. It's definitely ready and more than that. It's almost as fast as running something on-prem. And this is also one of the things with our analytic. We want to go from having more a forensic approach to near real-time and the long-term goal is to be real-time on both security as well as business optimization insights. Wow, that is, and it's really only possible with this new architecture, right? I mean, I don't know, did Google sort of pioneer the Kubernetes and this containerization? Is that happening across all cloud architectures or are they just the leader? How's that working? No, so Google, Google definitely Kubernetes, they have been one of the founders of that. There are alternatives as well, but one thing that Google do and it's the last mile, they have been a tier one, sort of biggest tier one priority with all the internet service providers. And as a result, what many people forget is they only focus on what's my ISP? What's my internet speed? Well, what they often forget is if you're not a tier one on the backbone of the service provider, it takes a very long, the last mile can be very long, but with Google, with probably with YouTube and several other things, they have been pushing and pushing and pushing and optimizing for years and we're just leveraging that. And let's say, for example, you were running your own data center or even you were doing some share or co-location type of thing, you're still not a tier one in many cases on the backbone and that's what, or on the infrastructure and that's what Google is providing us and that's why it is here, it's now and everything can go cloud first. We are a strong believer of that. Yes, it's interesting. I have played with several different cloud type products over years and video and for quite a while and I did video 20 years ago, we were doing it on phone line and there's a place for everything but at the speeds that this is happening today and the testing that I've been doing in my spot with ArcBase, it's really no different than if I had it right in the shop and that's been my experience with it so far. So I think a lot of people who don't think security goes in the cloud, video goes in the cloud, I don't think they've played with it and they really understand how well it really works today because you get so much more resiliency, all the security built in. I've been a big fan, I've just been waiting on the speeds to be right and I think you've nailed that one. And you're sitting in Hawaii and we're sending that data all the way up to you to a central and back up with almost no latency. Yeah, that's true. I sometimes forget where we are when it's, because we do have, like even my office system, Office 365 can have issues. Sometimes there's just issues with just distance for us so it's important to us that it works and the customers that I have here on cloud type solutions are they're concerned about that until they start driving them and they see that actually it works fine. So we'll have some fun with it out here as well. Let's talk a little bit about maybe what sort of limitations that you did run into. We've got I think four or five minutes left. So as you started to build or started to go forward, what did you run into that said, wow, okay, we got to retool, we got to go a little different direction or maybe just knock down every obstacle that you came up against and move forward. We for sure knocked down a few obstacles that's clear. But I would say I of course want to go as much cloud as we can as quickly as we can. One of the things I think we've failed a little bit on early on is the whole hybrid approach. There is a lot of people in the physical security industry that they know on-prem and they know it really well but things have changed and it's the IT department and the CIO and cloud is coming from the top as an important thing. And they have done a big investment and often they are sitting with a lot of on-premise equipment and they may be just invested in that recently. And of course we came in at first with the mindset that let's just cloud connect the whole thing, let's go with a small little connector that's all that sits on the edge. So one thing we have implemented now is sort of a quick little ISO or an appliance builder where you can just take an old piece of hardware you already invested in, you plug in that USB, you boot up the machine and then we install everything for you and it just magically pops up in the cloud solution. So you can utilize the equipment and the investments you have already made yet cloud enable it. And the best part of us taking sort of taking over that machine is then we run the update even on the operating system for you. So we make sure it's always up to date so you don't have to roll trucks and lose money on that as an integrator. Yeah. Are the customers in that scenario? Are you gonna let them store some video locally and then push some more to the cloud like keep a week on-prem and put the 30-day or the 90-day storage in the cloud? What's the thinking there? We can actually allow, that's what the customer wants. We have some customers that have low requirements that have to keep 30 days on-prem and 90 days in the cloud or even some that needs a year or more in the cloud. And that's actually something we can configure per customer depending on the type of hardware and how much store and forward they sort of have there. So we can be flexible. Otherwise, we have some intelligent way of how we upload the data to trickle it up. And of course, when it's redundant on both places, it's even better. But I have to say the cloud is you can't get more redundant than that. I agree. We are actually doing multi-data centers as well for geographical redundancy. Awesome. Whether it's in the air, craze or fire or anything like that, natural disaster. Sure. So the customers are gonna be the winners here if they can get their surveillance and get these business intelligence applications out of this in the cloud. We're looking forward to a whole lot out of your team. I know you've been pushing them really hard. Congratulations on the launch up there. I really wish I had made it up there for that. Maybe I will get to the West Coast again soon and I look forward to hanging out with you guys. But if not, get you back in here after the first of the year for another update and see what Archuliz is doing. I would love to come on the show again. Thank you so much. Great. Thanks so much, Andreas. We're gonna be ending now. But check out Archuliz at Archuliz.com if you got surveillance questions about the cloud and doing security and just what they can do for you. It's all there right on their website. Make sure you pay attention. It'll save you some money and it'll give you some great functionality. This is Andrew signing off. Aloha.