the interview Efficiency manageme Pierre Racz has steered Genetec since 1997 and he has no plans to quit or to sell the company. In this interview with Detektor, he compares security software with the human brain and expresses his views on why he believes the market will consolidate. “Every company will be a software company in the future, he says” By Henrik Söderlund Canadian Genetec is a global provider of IP video surveillance, access control and license plate recognition solutions all unified into a single software platform. The company has more than 650 employees, of which 400 are located in Canada. It is a private company and more than 20 per cent of revenues are spent on research and development. Pierre Racz says Genetec has a healthy turnover and that the growth rate is above the growth rate that is quoted in market surveys. You have said that the industry is moving from being hardware centric to become software centric. “When we started it was very hard to convince the industry to actually pay for software. Today, the industry understands where the value is. A good indicator of this is that in projects, we represent anywhere between 5 and 15 per cent of the total value. It is just like the human body where the brain by weight is 3 per cent – the legs are about 40 per cent – but you can still live with your leg cut off. Software is very strategic and it does create value for the users.” Can you give an example? “What we are doing is that we are codifying repetitive human actions so that humans can concentrate on doing better things. Just as we have seen how the introduction of calculators in classroom has enabled younger children to work at a higher level of abstraction. Instead of having to learn repetitive algorithms to do multiplications and additions, in the same way, more and more, the technology is enabling the security professionals to concentrate on the security job and ignore the technology. So there is real value in the software, and our planet as a whole is getting much more software centric than it has ever been before. And this is true even in the security industry.” You deal with IP video surveillance, access control and license plate recognition. Which is the biggest? “More and more, what Genetec is about is helping our customers to achieve operational efficiency. When we say video is most important, it is more general than that. What we do is we marry structured information, like point of sale data, access control data etc. with unstructured information such as video and by combining the two we are able to help our customers gain insight into their operations, or even gain operational efficiency. Insight into your operations will let you find operational mistakes that can be avoided but are hard to figure out. But also, decision support lets you plan ahead of time how you go from an undesirable situation to a desirable outcome.“ Pierre Racz has steered Genetec since 1997 and he has no plans to quit or to sell the company. the growth rates are more in line with the market and the market is growing at anywhere between 20 to 30 per cent a year. We were smelling that something was going to be wrong before 2008 but we thought it was going to be North America so we invested heavily in Europe only to be surprised about how slowly this was in coming, but now we see that it is picking up again.” Are you targeting high end or low end? “We do not view that in the same way as the industry does. When they say high end or low end, they count the number of cameras and we think this is wrong. We are democratising the enterprise way of managing distributed computing systems. An enterprise needs central policy and local execution. Take Starbucks as an example –they are really a forward thinking company; they have a small amount of cameras in each of their stores. But what is so amazing is the low number of people that are required for them to manage. They are able to set policies centrally but with local executions. You would not believe the savings that they have.” It is just like the human body where the brain by weight is 3 per cent – the legs are about 40 per cent – but you can still live with your leg cut off. Is the US your biggest market? “Yes it is, although Europe is substantially close to it. They were almost equal before the 2008 crisis, and after that it took about two months for the Americans to brush off the dust and get back on the horse; Europe has got back up, but was a lot slower to do so. We have had a growth rate of 55 per cent in the US, where as in Europe You have said that inventing new technology is what you are aiming at. What will be your next step? “We are focusing on a few things; one is producing a continuous stream of clever innovations. But we want to deliver this with excellence of execution and with the enhanced cooperation with the best of breed of our ecosystem. So, the continuous stream of clever innovations is that our customers want us to not only to fulfill their needs now but to anticipate their needs in the future, and this is our pledge to them – we are working hard to anticipate what they are going to need in the future.” What is your view on the cloud? “If you ask security people today they say that the cloud is for the future. But the fact that we have it now – and of course some of our customers are already adopting it – means that we are future prepared for our customers. And when they want to adopt the cloud, we are ready. And I can tell you everyone will adopt the cloud. Just imagine a hundred years ago; every manufacturing plant had its own team of engineers to produce electricity to Security News Every Day – www. securityworldhotel.com