Panasonic Acquires Cameramanager.com to Enter Cloud

Panasonic has acquired Cameramanager.com, which provides video surveillance-as-a-service (VSaaS) solutions for customers across Europe.

The company was founded in 2007 by Tijmen Vos and Rishi Lodhia. The Amsterdam-based company’s acquisition by Panasonic was announced during a press conference at The Rembrandt Tower in Amsterdam on Friday. IFSECGlobal.com was in attendance.

As a result of the acquisition, the Cameramanager.com team — which has customers in the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Brazil, Latvia, Russia, and Turkey — will now join forces with Panasonic Europe. Laurent Abadie, chairman and CEO of Panasonic Europe, explained:

This acquisition is an important strategic step towards enhancing our smart and connected services offering in the European and CIS market.

With Cameramanager.com’s bespoke software and cloud-based solutions complementing our existing security business, we will be able to significantly enhance our presence in this space by bringing together technical know-how and software skills that equip us with the necessary assets to be able to respond to future demands in cloud services.

Abadie highlighted Panasonic’s deliberate move towards total solutions and the fact that the company will “never lose sight of the importance of innovation.”

As far as Abadie’s concerned, Cameramanager.com is “the perfect partner” for Panasonic, allowing the company to create a whole new business platform around cloud services for the B2B and B2C marketplaces.

Click here to view Figure 1.

Also attending the press conference was Masaki Arizono, the managing director of Panasonic System Communications Company Europe, alongside Jose Riolobos, European head of professional camera solutions in Europe, and Jeroen Cleijne, security product marketing manager for Europe.

Perspectives from Cameramanager.com
The CEO of Cameramanager.com, Rishi Lodhia, told journalists:

Since its inception in 2007, Cameramanager.com has gone from strength to strength, and we’re now ready to take the next step in the company’s development by joining forces with Panasonic to bring end-to-end, cloud-based surveillance to a wider market. Our values are so closely aligned to those of Panasonic. Together, we remain committed to delivering excellence in online security. As well as providing great solutions for the end customer, we also want to create new business for security installers and integrators.

At the moment, Cameramanager.com manages over 40,000 bespoke camera connections on a global basis. The company offers cloud-based camera surveillance connections to PCs, Macs, smartphones, and tablets.

Lodhia continued:

Our corporate culture at Cameramanager.com is all about CATCH — We’re Creative and entrepreneurial, Ambitious, Team players, Customer-driven and both Honest and Humble. We genuinely believe we can be the leading cloud management company in the world.

Lodhia’s colleague Tijmen Vos spoke of the three pillars of Cameramanager.com:

We are 100% about the cloud. We have never had software installed on the customer side. Also, we’re all about an open API. Last but not least, it’s about ‘Smart’. In other words, smart messaging.

Find out more about Panasonic System Communications Company Europe.