2020 Imaging, a small company based in East Sussex, is currently punching well above its weight in terms of security Control Room design and management.
In essence, the organisation has completely rethought and remodelled the collection, storage, display and management of information in Control Rooms, fusing the resultant data into a single interface that automatically processes notifications and simplifies interactions between multiple systems.
Driven by the adoption of IP networks for the transmission of data from remote devices and sensors (and, increasingly, from video cameras), 2020’s TuchControl represents a totally new concept in integrated command and control.
A concept that invokes a groundbreaking multi-touch screen interface to provide a holistic view for the security control centre operator, in turn enabling rapid and effective real-time response.
The system is adept at combining available sensor data – including output from video content analytics – with precise geographical information by using 3D maps and GPS location data to accurately plot all assets, alarms, sensor readings and mobile resources.
Live video feeds may be superimposed onto 3D maps and models with the camera space and virtual (3D) space treated as one.
This easily-configurable, modular system is being launched in earnest at IFSEC 2011, and visitors will immediately spot the fact that this solution has a wide range of applications – from national security, Critical National Infrastructure and military uses through to city surveillance, building management and security for industrial and transportation systems.
Looking back on the early days
Nigel Barrington, 2020 Imaging’s entrepreneurial chief executive, leads the company’s small management team.
How did Barrington arrive at his current position, creating and managing a successful small company that produces such innovative security solutions?
After completing an MSc in genetics at Cambridge University, Barrington turned his attentions to international business, living all over the world for a time before starting his own marketing company and representing a number of major UK plcs on an international basis when it came to programmes focused on areas including defence and security.
During his diverse career, Barrington has also managed a number of UN protocol programmes and barter arrangements on behalf of major clearing banks.
Barrington formed 2020 Imaging back in 2000 with David Hollick, the company’s research and development director (or ‘creative guru’, as Barrington likes to call him), and has expertly steered the business to its current position as a leader in the field of video analytics and integrated Physical Security Information Management System (PSIM) solutions.
Key to the success of 2020 Imaging is an exclusive partnership with the Engineering Department of the University of Sussex, a liaison formed by Barrington and Hollick back in 2006 to develop underlying core technology, thus providing a huge research and development resource to back up the expertise and enterprise shown by the small company.
Hollick’s diverse career has played out primarily in senior technical, marketing and financial roles in the field of specialist software development. He originally came from an economics and market research background, which gave him a focused conception of likely future events in the security industry (and also of the industry’s shortcomings from an outsider’s point of view).
Original focus on video analytics
“The idea for the business came from a cousin who wanted to protect his cars in a parking lot with intelligent wireless IP cameras,” Hollick told SMT Online. “The original focus was on video analytics, which reduce reliance on the human operator, and on wireless IP video and CCTV cameras.”
Hollick met Barrington by chance in 2005 and the business was born in early 2006. “By being on the outside, but well versed in technology and observing the massive changes in dynamics in the industry, I was able to see what I felt was lacking in it,” explained Hollick.
According to Hollick, all of the other control centre systems on the market have been built on traditional Windows platforms.
“Ours is a completely fresh approach,” he enthused. “It’s a graphical user interface designed for multi-touch so that complex and difficult-to-navigate tasks can be dealt with very rapidly in an easy and intuitive fashion. Our system takes take a mere ten seconds to handle tasks that would otherwise take around a minute using a conventional mouse.”
At this point in our conversation, Barrington chipped in: “The system can search for information very quickly – files and alerts are sent across the network immediately. It’s also very efficient – people who work on our system engage with it easily. Third, it’s an open system so that other manufacturers’ existing equipment and new devices from third parties can be added. That being the case, it’s easily adapted for different applications, from police service use through to oil company applications, for example.”
Accessing the key vertical markets
As you would expect, 2020 Imaging is involved with major clients in key vertical markets – among them resilience and transportation – and is also currently looking at oil and gas and retail (the latter in the form of major shopping malls).
“We promote the product via channel marketing through integrators,” stated Hollick. “We encourage brand management and insist that all our channel partners use the words ‘Powered by 2020 TuchControl’ within their solution. We have the keys to unlock new sales for the big integrators, and we want to be the engine within the framework of this major integration.”
Barrington observed: “The market is very fluid, Brian. Last year, for example, we were focusing on the police market, while before that we were looking at transport with Siemens.”
In February this year, the product was demonstrated to Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan at IDEX 2011 and subsequently featured on Abu Dhabi TV news.
“The resulting publicity,” enthused Barrington, “meant we were approached by several defence and international oil companies.”
Turning R&D into sales
According to Barrington, the key focus at 2020 Imaging in the next year or so will be moving from research and development and marketing to actual sales, 60% of which he anticipates will take place overseas (particularly in the Middle East, India and the USA) with the rest in the UK.
Barrington also foresees expansion into South American and central Asian markets.
“We have a range of products developed specifically to bolt-on to existing systems for the UK market, but we’ve also been able to put complete new solutions together for international markets, such as the bespoke solutions we have devised for UAE countries,” explained Barrington.
“Nobody else in the world has what we offer. We have gone from being a Control Room software supplier to becoming advisors and integrators, helping clients overseas and acting as security consultants.”
From a security and defence point of view, the opportunities are – in Barrington’s words – “very bright”.
Indeed, the company has been involved in a number of sales promotion activities with Gerald Howarth, the UK Minister for International Security Strategy, with whom Barrington will be going on a delegation to India at the end of the year.
“We have also attended meetings with Nick Herbert, the Minister of State for Policing and Criminal Justice in the UK, so the profile of the company has been significantly raised of late. We’re very encouraged by the opportunities here in the UK and overseas.”
Cementing ties with global integrators
Going forward, 2020 Imaging has extensive ambitions. The company intends to cement its already strong relationships with major global integrators such as Siemens, Lockheed and General Dynamics.
In addition, Barrington and Hollick will build on 2020 Imaging’s middleware platform – the ‘glue’ that enables disparate devices to talk intelligently to each other, consolidating very diverse systems into one unified system. Hollick has identified this as an important trend in the security industry.
2020 has incorporated a major global open platform (The Niagara Framework) that any major integrator can employ – and that’s being used all over the world – into its system.
“There has been a lot of consolidation in the industry where these so-called independent PSIM players have been bought up by large integrators, so we will be one of the most significant independent providers of that open platform in the world,” confirmed Hollick.
“We intend to build on the same commercial model and grow, possibly with new investors. Ideally, it would be good to remain independent,” Hollick continued, “as there’s a huge requirement for an independent open platform.”
2020 Imaging aspires to be the dominant technology company in the global critical infrastructure and resilience markets.
“The major integrators have huge power, so we are trying to create a focus and a branding that will bring our technology into the forefront of those markets,” stated Hollick. “So far, it;s proving very positive.”
Barrington added he had been told by some large defence companies that, at the moment, his company is at least 12 months ahead of similar operations in terms of what it has to offer end users.
“We will be bringing out Versions 2 and 3 of 2020 TuchControl in the next few months. Financing this is my current priority so that we can stay ahead.”
Impressions of the general security marketplace
What do the two managers think of how the security market in general is faring as the global economy hauls itself out of recession?
Barrington is upbeat, pointing out that the international security market is currently growing by 25% per annum.
Perhaps a tad more cautious, Hollick opined: “The security market has taken a hit like everything else in the last few years, and forecasted growth rates didn’t take place at quite the same rate as anticipated.”
However, Hollick noted the “massively quick” adoption of IP cameras, which he suggested has changed the whole logic of the industry.
“Rather than people selling little boxes of distributors to security managers, this has become a Board-level decision. The key to this is the control room, which lies at the heart of the whole solution to these big systems.”
Barrington has a buoyant outlook on the business. “We haven’t suffered at all in the recession,” he asserted. “Since we have new products taken on in the UK as Best of Breed, we’ve been able to expand rapidly overseas.”
Maintaining the team ethic
However, it hasn’t all been plain sailing. As CEO, keeping together a team of individuals who are highly intellectual and creative has been challenging for Barrington over the last few years, not only financially but also from a personality point of view.
“The key objective is that the team must work well together while at the same time differentiating everyone’s roles,” he urged.
The company has four people based in the sales and marketing office in Sussex, 15-20 people at Sussex University, three full-time consultants and four people in its London development office. They’re all split into different departments so there’s no invasion of other people’s turf.
“This has been quite hard to do,” Barrington stated, “but I think we’ve managed to succeed on that front.”
Finding the additional resources required to keep the company moving ahead has also been a challenge in the UK.
“I put in some of my own money,” said Barrington, “and we’ve been very fortunate in securing funding from a passive Indian investor who provided the means of developing the advanced systems we now have in place. We’ve invested a great deal of money in the business.”
The bigger picture and the fine detail
Barrington and Hollick spend a large chunk of their time keeping up-to-date with business and commercial trends by using a huge variety of media to give them both the big picture and the detail.
They make good use of exhibitions, market research material, the trade press, specialist newsletters and, of course, the Internet.
“We look at big takeovers and what’s happening to major companies,” said Hollick. “In terms of using websites to judge what’s happening in the market, we really like Info4Security and John Honovich’s IP video market information website.”
Staying ‘close to the ground’ is clearly very important. “We talk to a lot of high profile companies that give us feedback, but speaking directly to our own customers is the best way to find out what’s really going on,” asserted Barrington.
Hollick believes that, contrary to many people’s fear of living in a ‘Surveillance State’, the more systems move towards intelligent digital technology the better people are safeguarded.
“IP technology is capable of focused intelligence and focused intrusion, whereas traditional analogue systems were effectively a catch-all where the people in the control room could look at all the information coming across the monitors from the camera feeds,” he stated.
“The focus of the system is on determining the logic of what has actually occurred on the ground, not sitting in Control Rooms looking at masses of information. People can be blacked out and eliminated on video so that only events are looked at and people’s faces only revealed if necessary.”
Barrington added: “In an intelligence-driven system like ours, software analytics and computers are picking up events, alerts and incidents so that unless you are involved with a misdemeanour, the cameras will not pick you up. This technology should actually be more comforting for Human and Civil Rights issues and make people happier. It’s the computer that’s doing the monitoring, not people.”
Proposed cuts to UK policing numbers
2020 Imaging is hoping it can help fill the breach when the 20%-25% cuts in police numbers mooted by the Government kick in. Barrington has sat on a number of committees discussing this issue, and does not condone the police cuts in terms of manpower.
However, he sees a positive aspect to them. “The police have now had to look at ways of using next generation technology to improve efficiency, obtain better information and enable enhanced results from the resources they do have,” he observed.
Hollick agreed: “The systems have the capacity to provide rapid transfer and assimilation of specific events to where they are needed. Technology allows a better way of using police time.”
Critical National Infrastructure security is never far from anyone’s mind, and the analytical properties and speed of 2020’s security surveillance system enable multiple different agencies to see the same thing in real-time.
Barrington explained: “Our product was driven by the need for a complete surveillance system that will give immediate response and get the right information to the right decision-makers. It can bring major benefits, not only for traditional police and security work but also for the Government in terms of defence, keeping our citizens safe and preventing terrorist activities.”
Future of Security Competition
2020 Imaging’s TuchControl is one of the global finalists in the prestigious Future of Security Competition run in conjunction with Global Security Challenge. The finalists will be judged in a live ‘Dragons’ Den’-style final that takes place in The SMT SELECT Lounge at the NEC on Tuesday 17 May. between 2.00 pm and 4.30 pm
In this competition, innovative but at the same time cost-effective commercial security solutions are submitted from individuals, groups and companies in the security technology space with an annual turnover below euro 50 million.
2020 Imaging has also been nominated as a finalist in the Integrated Security Product of the Year category of the IFSEC Security Industry Awards 2011, wherein security innovations over the last 12 months are showcased.
A video of TuchControl in action can be viewed by accessing the web link on the right hand panel of this page
For further information contact 2020 Imaging on (telephone) 01580 201715 or via e-mail: [email protected]
Alternatively, visit the website (again, a dedicated link has been provided on the right hand panel of this page)
To see and try out the TuchControl product itself, visit 2020 Imaging on Stand B83 in Hall 4 at IFSEC 2011, which runs from 16-19 May at Birmingham’s NEC
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