the interview Genetec President and CEO Pierre Racz emphasises a continuous and accelerating move towards a more software centric physical security industry where every company becomes a software company. Genetec CEO Pierre Racz: “Price pressure imposes hardware manufacturers to look towards software” Genetec President and CeO Pierre Racz emphasises a continuous and accelerating move towards a more software centric physical security industry where every company becomes a software company. Also, Genetec has recently launched a pay-as-you-go payment model. “The cloud is the next big thing in security. It is inevitable, to quote the words of Matrix”, Pierre Racz says. By Henrik Söderlund a “knock your socks off customer service” to our customers”, he says. How are you doing in the European market compared to North America? “The US market is 28 billion dollars and EMEA is about half of that. We are experiencing a lot of growth in the European market. Since 2008, Europe has slowed compared to the US market where we have grown more than 50 per cent per year. But now, especially this year, Europe is growing quite fast. Since we are a totally private company, we can grow at a rate where we can generate profits to reinvest into that growth. And right now we are reinvesting a great deal in Europe by opening a new office in Germany; and last year we started up a team in Sweden as we grow in the Nordics; our British team also has quite a strong growth rate. We continue to have a big software development team in Paris and we now have some software development in Austria as well.” Last year, you said that the industry is moving to become more software centric and less hardware centric. How fast is that happening? “The pace is a little faster than I thought. There are multiple pressures behind that, one of them is the flood of cheap cameras from Asia and this is putting downward price pressure on the hardware, so a lot of the hardware manufacturers need to make their devices smarter and they are looking towards software to actually differentiate themselves and create value.” What other pressures are there? “The other pressure is just on the scale of the systems. People are still putting in more and more cameras because cameras are actually bringing value to them by either, moderating unwanted behaviour or helping them to discover operational flaws that they can then solve. And this increasing quantity of cameras is in turn, increasing the necessity to be able to efficiently manage them; it means more software, not hardware, to manage hardware.” Is the industry finally adopting Security-as-a Service? “The adoption of Security-as-a Service is coming but it is coming slowly. Once again there are market forces that are pushing people With headquarters in Montréal, Québec Canada, Genetec Inc. is a global provider of IP video surveillance, access control and automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) solutions all unified into a single, open-architecture software platform. The company was founded in 1997, is privately owned, and has been growing faster than the physical security market. “We have a very ambitious growth plan, but this growth plan is not necessarily driven so much by our choice to grow, but rather the market is pushing us there by such a strong demand for our products. We are organised as a series of small companies within a big company,” Pierre Racz says. Genetec also has a team, whose job it is to ensure that the custo- mer experience commercially and the customer experience technically is as close to uniform as possible across the organisation. According to Pierre Racz, the company still has a small village atmosphere in- The cloud is the next big thing in security. It is inevitable, to quote the words of Matrix. ternally and a small company feel to their customers externally. “We have the energy of a small company, and we will continue to have that. We are here to stay. One of our goals is to continue to offer Security News Every Day – www. securityworldhotel.com 16 • d etektor internati onal