Back to the future of video, a conversation with Pierre Racz and Martin Gren

 

 

Guests

Martin Gren, co-Founder and director of the board of Axis Communications

Pierre Racz, President of Genetec Inc.

 

Description

Tune in to our talk with Martin Gren, inventor of the first network camera and co-founder of Axis Communications, and Pierre Racz, President of Genetec Inc. In Engage Episode 8, Pierre and Martin look back at more than 50 combined years of technological innovation. Listen along as we explore their journey helping the physical security industry switch from analog to IP and discuss what they see coming that will shape the future of our industry.   

 

Transcript

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Welcome to Engage a Genetec podcast. 

 

"I created electronic gadgets. I'm not a security person, and all of a sudden, here I am in the center of the security industry." - Martin Gren. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: The physical security industry has come a long way in the past couple of decades. But with the development of more advanced threats, industry leaders must identify risks and adapt products to stay relevant and thrive. In a special edition of Engage, we’ll talk with two career innovators in the physical security space; Martin Gren, Board Chair of Access Communications, and Pierre Racz, President of Genetec. 

 

"All I can say is that you're going to have to pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands." - Pierre Racz. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Later in the episode, we will deep dive into where the technology is going and find out what Martin and Pierre expect in an ever-changing industry. But first, where did it all start? We'll look back at the origin stories of these two pioneering enterprises. We'll look at their early bets, challenges, and the Eureka moments along the way. What was the road Pierre took to build a Genetec, a global leader in physical security? And what led Martin from the business of print servers to the creation of network cameras as we see them today? I'm David Chauvin. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Martin and Pierre provide future leaders with a unique look into the origins of today's physical security space and how technology can play a role in shaping an industry. I started our conversation by asking Martin and Pierre about their experiences pushing the envelope. 

 

CONVERSATION BEGINS 

DAVID CHAUVIN: So, I want to start with the bit of going back in the past and exploring the stories and seeing how we got here in the first place. You both have played pivotal roles in the progress of our industry. And let's be honest, our industry is, to say the least, technologically conservative in a lot of different ways. Yet you've pushed the barrier of what's possible for over two decades now, each of you. If you look back to where you were 20, 25 years ago, are you surprised by the amount of progress you've been able to push in this industry? Martin, I'll start with you. 

 

MARTIN GREN: Yeah, well, I mean, as you know, Axis was founded in 1984, long before IP video. We built Axis on a business model of always using resellers and being the best friend of a reseller. We had a mantra of connecting anything to the network. In 1995, a colleague and I got the idea to connect a camera to the network. So by doing that, in 1996, we created the world's first network camera, and we did some market studies, and we found the market to be all analog. We said to ourselves that even if this is something we don't understand, the market will either remain analog for the rest of our lives or onto something big. So we looked into that, and we decided to risk the whole company by investing in the first generation of our first chipset. We created the chip, the first Harpic that gave us the first modern network camera back in 1999 with embedded limits. And that is the role model of all network cameras today. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And what happened to that print server business? 

 

MARTIN GREN: The print service had kept on growing until 2001 when it started to decline at about the same pace as the camera business was increasing. So it looked like your company revenues were flat. But in reality, we had high growth in the camera business. And, in the end, we sold it and can you imagine who bought it? Well, we sold it to Canon, of course. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: So obviously, you look at the industry today, and you can't be that surprised of where it went and how much it evolved. That was your initial bet 25 plus years ago. Is there anything that surprises you regarding the path that our industry took during those 25 years? 

 

MARTIN GREN: We realized when we did some market studies and our main enemy, initially at least, was the incumbents like Telco in particular. We looked at Telco and tried to be better than them in many aspects and still maintaining our business model because that has always been our secret sauce. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And so you mentioned this idea of the camera. Why security camera? 

 

MARTIN GREN: Well, we could connect anything to the network, and the camera was just a coincidence. More or less, we did it because we could. But we have a strong culture of looking at the market and understanding how to do business. And one of the historical moments for myself was around 2005 when I realized I'm in the security industry because I never saw myself as a security person. I created electronic gadgets. I'm not a security person, and then, here I am in the center of the security industry. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: As we know in the security industry, you never leave once you're in it. Now Pierre, what about you? If you go back to the original idea, did you expect the industry to become what it is today, or did you envision it to be different from what it is? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: It was a series of accidents that sort of brought Genetec into the video space in the security industry. During the 80s, when I was doing my graduate engineering work, I worked in analog bipolar transistors, making high-speed filters, Nyquist filters. Get this for video codecs. I was working with other people making the digital part of it. I was doing the analog front end for video codecs at Nortel Research. I never thought that I'd wind up doing this for the rest of my life. But the biggest surprises for me were the difficulties in convincing people of some basic staples of the VMS architecture today. The first thing was that the network architecture in the 90s, people were using T1 lines and other telecom lines, or at least the people I was working with making the codec. And I could not convince them that it was a point to multipoint. It was multicast was the way to go. And basically, it's when we decided to do it on our own, we said, you know, the heck with this. We're going to do it on an IP network, which we then bought off-the-shelf H261 encoder-decoder cards from Osprey. These were for teleconferencing and Omnicast 1.0. It was an industrial computer that had four full-length cards for the video coding for each channel, and essentially for about 50,000 dollars, we could do four channels. Amazingly, we managed to sell some of these to some industrial sites, but not enough to make this thing work. I think the excitement is the luck we had that we met another little Montreal company called Smart Site. They were building a codec, and they wanted to use this to transmit it on wireless. But they knew that they needed a control protocol. So, they tried to create this open architecture group to design a control system for their cameras. And we discovered them by chance because we were trying to do a project for the Port of Quebec. And then when they found out what we were doing, they showed us their proposed architecture, and that's what we've implemented. And so that's when we integrated their equipment. That is how Omnicast 2.0 Started. When 9/11 unfortunately came, people wanted to send videos over the networks. They tried a point to multipoint architecture because they wanted to share video. So, one of our driving projects was for a large gas utility that wanted to have control rooms on either side of St. Lawrence for security reasons. And running telecom lines was just way too expensive. I guess the rest is history. You know, but there are many things that we had that we were surprised at the resistance. When we made our SDK for Access Control, we were surprised that companies wouldn't use our SDK to put multimedia in their access control systems. It turns out it was easier for us to receive events from the access control system than for us to send the video. Then the next big thing that we encountered we were surprised was the initial reluctance to go to the cloud. And now it's all the rage. I guess that my whole adventure in the video was a series of hard to convince people to do the right thing that we're doing today. We were persistent, and here we are. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And so, again, if we go back to the first few years, going back to that time and thinking, what was your vision of the industry? Is there a significant gap between what you had thought then and where we are today? 

 

MARTIN GREN: Well, I mean, IP video has created many new applications that just weren't possible with analog technology. I mean, I think, in general, that goes for critical infrastructure like city surveillance. And to some extent, one could say that we are following Moore's Law, which is the driving force for our industry. Back when I started Axis back in 1984, I loved building cool gadgets and selling them. I wanted to sell them in volume to have many happy users. I think we succeeded pretty well because there are many satisfied Axis camera users worldwide. I mean, wherever I go, I can see Axis cameras, and many of them are also Genetec powered, which is excellent as well. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: What about you, Pierre? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: The driving idea behind Genetec was in the 90s was to write and promote object-oriented software in the application itself. It wasn't as important as the way we built the application. One of the things that were very clear to me, I was convinced that multicast was going to be the way that we were going to communicate. And we said, well, you know, in three or four more cycles, the computing power will have caught up, and the quality of the video is going to be acceptable. And we're going to get rid of this analog low pass filter that is NTSC or pow. I underestimated how quickly that would occur. I thought that by 2005, that would be all digital cameras, but that didn't happen until at least 2012. I think when we started, we cross that threshold. There are some things I saw, some things I didn't. I also didn't believe that Genetec would grow to the size it has. There are people that famously quote, "never will Genetec be more than 50 people." And then we hit 50, and they said it "never will it be more than one hundred people." And then when we hit 100 people, I stopped saying that because I knew I was going to be wrong. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And today we're at? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: We're at 1600 people. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And Martin, for you, when was that moment where you stopped counting? When you said, OK, this is taking off? 

 

MARTIN GREN: Oh, for me, when we were like 50, we had our first building, and we had a large warehouse operation. And I just said, wow, this is amazing. We just kept growing, and I mean, nowadays I feel more at home when I visit our subsidiaries. And even if I visit Boston, it's a huge office there as well. Now, I feel at home in the regional offices because they are smaller than headquarters. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: After all these years, you're still, you know, Pierre you're the CEO, Genetec, you're both at the head of the companies. What drives you? What gets you out of bed in the morning? 

 

MARTIN GREN: Well, I love this industry. I have a passion for my cool electronic products. And I love all the people and the partners that we have gotten to know and work with. I mean, I can travel wherever in the world I want. And I meet people just like the people here in London or South Africa or Japan. And it's like one big, great family. And that includes partners. That consists of the Genetec people because we work so often together. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And what about you, Pierre? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: The people also are part of it. I don't miss the airplanes, but I miss being there and the dinners and the discussion. And, you know, the other part of the answer is why are we still around? It reminds me of the talk that Dr. Marvin Minsky gave at the Edge Institute. And he was talking about, you know, he would ask people, you know, would you want to live forever? And most people would say, well, no. And he goes, why? Because I'll be old and creaky, and he says, well, what if we could set you research your clock to half the age today? And he said no because I'd get bored. But for scientists, it's different because we all have. I have my whole bunch of problems that will require a century or two to solve. Break 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Though our guests, Pierre and Martin, may not have a century to answer all of my questions, in the second half of this special edition of Engage, we talk to them about what they see coming. 

 

"Things have certainly changed around here. I remember when this is all farmland as far as the eye could see." - Back to the Future. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Like inventor Dr. Emmett Brown in the 1985 classic movie Back to the Future, Pierre and Martin's revolutionary ideas have shaped our industry over the last 25 years.  

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: The future may be hard to predict, but we ask Pierre and Martin what lies ahead for them and our industry in this second half of our show. I started by asking about a topic that is on all of our minds, cybersecurity. 

 

PART TWO 

DAVID CHAUVIN: We know that our industry is, again, somewhat conservative. So, Martin, how do you see the challenge of cybersecurity? 

 

MARTIN GREN: Well, I mean, my first cybersecurity incident that happened back in 1996, actually the same year within the first camera, was our print service. We have a supply factory in Germany where our print servers brought the whole factory down. So, of course, when we did the first network camera, we had to apply the same rules as the print server. We tested it just like a print server, not as a camera. Reliability was the key. And that's how we built the cameras for reliability and, to be honest, not for the best picture quality, but that was very rude. And today, of course, we have all these problems with customers, with old versions of the VMS and using old cameras for a long time. But the trick is to have them connect it to a good VMS that can manage the cameras. And of course, you should apply all the good policies from the hardware in terms of upgrading to the LTS firmware, which means the long-term support firmware. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And so, between the cameras, providing the tools for bulk updates and more upgrades and the VMS managing those devices. Pierre, do you feel like our industry is doing enough to counter some of the cybersecurity concerns that are now part of our everyday lives? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: At the beginning of Genetec, we were always involved with the early adopters. They were quicker to apply upgrades and patches. And then, as the cameras became more common than before, you know what? We were brought kicking and screaming into physical security to get the people to understand how to deal with the problem. So, look, the strategy is a short-term containment, and then there's a long-term education strategy. We're trying to educate the customers on the importance of doing this. So what annoys me about cybersecurity, it's a distraction for us to do other cool things. Still, I guess it's a necessary evil. How will the future evolve? Well, I think that a good analogy is the human immune system. And the way our immune system works is that the viruses or bacteria do get in. More often than not, they're intercepted before they can do too much damage and ejected. And our computer networks have to be designed the same way. Where It's compartmentalized enough so that when they do find a way in, we quickly detect and contain them and then turn them out. And so, I guess this is the reality today. When I started with computers, there was no security. It was all university, it was all cooperative, and nobody had malicious intent. Unfortunately, that world does not exist anymore. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Do you think our industry is ready in the face of increasing attacks? Do you believe that people are educated enough to understand the everyday threat, or do you feel like our industry is still behind where it could be? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: You know, I don't think there's one answer to that, right. There are degrees of maturity. I believe that part of the problem is that cyber is abstract to people who don't have a software or scientific background. And so, they don't understand precisely the nature of the threat and how easy it is. And also, people don't know-how information that they might not think is valuable can be precious in, I guess, the wrong hands. Even the Wall Street Journal talked about that. They say that by 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission would start using some provisions in different regulations to hold the C suite personally responsible for cyber negligence. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: What do you think are the big topics coming up? They're going to have a severe impact on the industry over the next decade or so. 

 

MARTIN GREN: I think we mature on resolution. I mean, we're constantly applying with strive for more resolution. But image civility is something that we've been preaching for a long time. I mean, sometimes when it's dark, I mean, having a super high resolution doesn't help you to want a good compromise. You get big enough pixels to see what's going on with clarity. And it's very different when you optimize for still photography when you want to have the pleasure form of image quality versus security, where it doesn't need to look beautiful. But you have to see the details. Never so much more we can do on the image quality. I see an almost evolution there ahead of us. We're able to see better connectivity. I hope one day we will get rid of a password. For instance, we will see more integration of our IoT gear. I mean, we have created an IP audio, which is probably 20 years behind IP video. Just look on microphones and speakers, almost all analog today. We have done the video door station, an integrated part of a security system. We have a horn speaker, so if you see something wrong, you can deter it. Most people go away when they know that someone is watching them. Then we have all the big things about AI. But I don't think we don't dwell about that here. I know Pierre and I have a common view of AI and its use. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Pierre, in terms of new technology, 5G has been on the lips of people across industries for at least five years as a real game-changer. Do you think 5G will have a material impact on our industry, or do you think it'll be left for fringe applications? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: No, it's going to have a significant impact. It's not going to be what most people think. I don't think it is going to be so much the higher bandwidth that is available. But I think that what will be the big changer will be the lower latency. Now, as soon as we solve one problem, our users come back to say; I have two more issues I'd like you to address. So there are certain things that Martin and I will be working on. For example, maybe not transmitting more pixels, but capturing more pixels and then finding ways to either store them or figure out which of the higher resolution pixels are of interest to the end-user for a given application. And 5G will provide us with a different way of doing this, and then we'll be able to address problems that we have not yet imagined. 

 

MARTIN GREN: I mean, we have at Axis, given Moore's law is always working for us and we are a hardware company. So, I mean, we are putting more and more chip real estate to be used for applications. We launched the first camera platform ten years ago, which is now the industry standard for running software on a camera. We now have a deep learning module coming out and more and more cameras. And just knowing Moore's Law, you can extrapolate where it's going to be. And I hope to see a lot of Genetec applications also running here. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And so, we'll pivot now to the last part of the show. We have a couple of questions. The first one comes from René Michelle Paquet. His question is around privacy, and he says, or he asks when it comes to aligning with the world's strictest privacy and security standards, whose job is it? Will camera manufacturers like Axis be forced to improve their security stance? Or is it on companies like Genetec to improve the situation from a software perspective? And how possible is it for our industry to become secure, considering firmware, in general, is notoriously old and insecure? Martin, what are your thoughts? 

 

MARTIN GREN: Well, I mean, we have the benefits of living in a GDPR country here in Sweden. We've been playing with GDPR for quite some time now, and we have implemented stuff like Privacy Shield embedded in our cameras. In general, I think GDPR is on what you store and how you retrieve it. I would say that the vast majority of TV PR issues rely on the VMS, so it's not to such a large extent applicable to the camera. But the cameras can, for instance, do a bit of trickling on recording on FC card when the camera becomes sort of a media type of VMS. And then, of course, the GDPR will also apply to the camera. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Pierre, do you agree? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: When I was in university, the physics department had this wonderful teeshirt. Read fighting entropy is everybody's business. This lack of privacy is tantamount to chaos, so it's everybody's responsibility. So, of course, we rely on the camera manufacturers. We work closely with Axis to establish a high level of assurance of the camera's identity and the identity of the firmware in the camera. Of course, we can't do that if our end users are just dumping the problem on us. They have to delegate part of the problem to us, but they also have to address it. We will teach them as much as we can about what we know. But unless they have decided to do something independently, there's only so much that we can do. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Last question from Jermaine Santoya. And Jermaine asks, blockchain is an area of interest and carries some interesting implications for authentication. Does either organization Axis or Genetec have any plans to focus on these technologies? I'll start with you, Martin. 

 

MARTIN GREN: Well, for the time being, I mean, of course, we are following that in our new concept team, but so far, we have not seen an application for blockchain and cameras. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: And Pierre? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: we've been doing blockchain for at least four years now. Now, it's not the cryptocurrency blockchains, but it still is a distributed ledger. So they are users that use clearance to store their evidence. They're actually on a blockchain. Our blockchain is different from the cryptocurrency blockchain. The crypto blockchain's goal is to be anonymous versus ours, whose goal is to be highly authenticated. What this does is it simplifies the consensus algorithm for us. So, it makes it a lot easier for us to achieve this secure but distributed record system. If you want to share multimedia information securely, be highly confident in its security, and comply with all legislation, blockchain is it. That's why we've invested so much in blockchain. You'll see in the not too distant future that all of the records used to manage the Genetec VMS system will be stored in the blockchain. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Well, thank you so much for being with me today. You're both titans of the industry, you have great stories of how you got here, and you have a great outlook on the future. And I think we all know you'll both be out for quite some time. So it was entertaining to pick your brain on your thoughts on the industry and where we're going. Any last words for the audience before we end this conversation? Martin, I'll start with you. 

 

MARTIN GREN: I appreciate being invited here, and I just love our cooperation with Genetec. I mean, it's been super fruitful in the past, and I'm pretty sure it's going to remain a cooperative as it's always been. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Absolutely Pierre, any last words? 

 

PIERRE RACZ: We've been great at not sharing the naughty things that we are coming up with together. All I can say is that you're going to have to pry my keyboard from my cold, dead hands. 

 

DAVID CHAUVIN: Fantastic. Martin Care, thank you so much for being with us today. I'm David Chauvin. See you next time on Engage. 

 

Engage, a Genetec podcast is a production of Genetec Inc. The views expressed by the guests are not necessarily those of Genetec, its partners, or customers. For more episodes, visit our website at www.genetec.com or on your favorite podcasting app, or ask your smart speaker to play Engage a Genetec podcast.