Everyone cheers Ifsec's move to London in 2014. That is fully understandable. Birmingham feels like a peripheral location for most non-Britons. Still, Birmingham is England's second largest city and a centre for industrial fairs.

In the world of IP video, cameras are computers that can see. When we talk of computers, we talk of artificial intelligence. We talk of memory. Today we can compare an IP video system to the human eye and the brain. While there's no perfect calculation, the whole eye is said to have a total resolution of more than 100 megapixels, but this is hardly usable for surveillance and it's not the actual resolution that our brain (the VMS) computes.

The message from the market seems clear: major conglomerates in the security business have given up on their long standing strategy of growth through acquisition. None of them, excluding Tyco, have made a significant acquisition since 2010. In the five years prior to that they were all active in acquiring businesses both large and small; increasing their geographic scope and updating their technology.

Packaging security as a range of services instead of offering customers a heavy investment in product is utilising Security-as-a-Service. The perhaps most obvious sector for this migration is video surveillance. Here, the process towards SaaS has already begun, both technically and economically speaking.