Electronics Era: According to you how you are looking at the India’s vision of becoming the world’s Third-largest economy by 2047, marking 100 years of independence by advancing its journey to increase productivity and connectivity?
Alvin Chia: So, what we have seen in India, that there is an incredible journey. It’s already one of the fastest growing economies in the world on its way to becoming the third largest economy and, we also see that being big is by far India’s only goal – it’s part of the ‘Viksit Bharat’ vision to stand alongside other nations as a developed nation. And this means urbanization and modernization.
So, if you think about that, the journey starts with a few things: infrastructure, technology, and then, going forward, sustainability. It’s not just only about the GDP anymore it’s also again about a safer, more sustainable and higher quality standard of living. In this context modern Video technology and Articificial Intelligence are important tools.
Viksit Bharat’ vision of also empowering the youth, the poor, the women and the farmers resonates very well with Milestones values and capabilities.
Video technology and intelligent surveillance can make schools, universities, factories and offices more safe – and productive.
Electronics Era: Milestone had recently opened an experienced center in Bangalore, kindly explore some features of it and how Milestone as partners in India’s growth story, bringing in technology and innovation to support the country’s digital and industrial progress?
Alvin Chia: You know, our investment in India is growing. We have 10 years of serving India. We have offices in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, and it’s not just about the experience center, our office environment has also grown in size, especially in Bangalore. We’ve increased our headcounts by quite a lot over the last few years since the COVID time In the Bangalore Experience Center, we have brought together technology partners working with e.g. video analytics, dashboards, access control, audio conferencing and storage. First, we do that to showcase the capabilities of Milestone, the capabilities of the integration between Milestone Video Management System and our partners. We are able to showcase how well they work together and how well they address very particular use cases. That is the core use of the experience center.
Milestone works with over a thousand technology partners. Milestone integrates well with over 10,000 devices, so the flexibility and the possible solutions are close to limitless. So, the experience center now becomes a location where we brainstorm, where we generate ideas and where we solve challenges together with our partners and our customers. That is the beauty of the experience center we showcase a few use cases and a few examples, but it is truly a place where solutions are being generated.
Electronics Era: Explore how Milestone solutions can enhance safety and productivity in India’s evolving industrial landscape, particularly as India focuses on becoming a global manufacturing hub?
Alvin Chia: India is definitely very strongly on the way to becoming a global manufacturing hub, Here safety and efficiency is very important. Let me give a few examples. Modern Video technology can identify who is allowed to access certain machinery, and video technology can also identify who is not allowed to access or operate certain machinery. These helps protect employee safety and productions facilities in many manufacturing areas and supports the foreman or a facilities supervisor in keeping the employees safe.
Video technologies are also used to increase productivity of these manufacturing areas. In some cases, it is being used to oversee an assembly line to make sure that the workers are on track with production, to make sure that the goods are moving through the assembly line at the required rate, and to make sure they are going to the right zones. For example, in an assembly line, it has to be from A to see before it gets completed at, say, zone D. These are how, with the support of our technology partners, use cases like this has been implemented to ensure that a product moves through the line as quickly and as effectively as possible.
We, in Milestone, have worked with multiple car manufacturers in India, and we know that the India is one of the largest car manufacturers in the world, so we are looking very much forward to strengthen our ties.
Electronics Era: Given India’s push for digital infrastructure, kindly highlight Milestones contributions to support smart city projects, improving urban safety, and supporting India’s digital transition?
Alvin Chia: I think is about having the right level of healthcare, employment, living, housing and transportation systems. A smart city would include all of that. A smart city would definitely have a transportation system that allows a person not just reach from point A to point B quickly, whether it’s from home to work or from work to lunch, but also to do is safely and timely.
More importantly, the core of city security and safety is allowing our critical services, such as the fire department the law enforcement department, to be able to react to incidents quickly.
When we talk about smart cities and urban safety, video technology has been used very much by transportation agencies to monitor traffic, to ensure they know where the roads and highways are congested, and how they may divert traffic very quickly and re-divert it back as quickly to ensure that, at any point of time, critical areas in the city have the right level of potential response time from the fire department and law enforcement department.
All of this is done digitally via videofeeds. It is not done through a person standing there and calling the command center; all of this is done through video technologies in the future, and that is how video technology can support smart city projects.
Electronics Era: As we are moving on, by procurement in India, it will emerge as the world’s largest consumer for internet service, surpassing the developed economies like US and Europe. This is pushing the growth of data center in India. How Milestone systems help this growth by securing the promises along with security?
Alvin Chia: It’s quite amazing how important data centers are to the world today. Developed nation used to focus on employment, safety, security and high standards of living, such as having indoor bathrooms, refrigerators, and televisions. But today an equally important marker is the internet, and the access to it, and the importance of the access to data and information.
Data centers and the digital infrastructure are the backbone today. Just imagine a full power outage in a fully digitalized society: Everything would stop.
Protecting our farms, chickens, cows, crops, our harvests was the most important in the past. Today, protecting critical infrastructure like power plants, transport, telecom and data centers is vital. So, from a video technology perspective, with Milestone and our partners, we can ensure that only the right persons have access to critical infrastructure premises such as power plants and data centers.
Video technology is better than key cards. Key cards are cheap and effective, but they are not very effective. They cannot prevent loitering or what we call tailgating because if I have a key card and open a door, I can bring three or four people behind me. Additionally, I can lose my key card. Key cards cannot track locations.
In places where we really need a high level of governance, changing old fashioned key card with modern video access control makes the governance and security of the system so much more robust. That being said it is equally important, that the video system is as safe from hacking cybercriminals as possible.
When we talk about data centers, it’s not just about access control but very much about preventive damage control. For data centers, we need to make sure that we are linked up with building management systems and ensure that we are very strongly align with temperature monitoring, fire detection and linking incidents like these with the building management system and the fire departments to be able to react to potential damages that could happen.
There are many examples on how video technology can help securing critical infrastructure such as data center to move India forward.
Electronics Era: How do you tackle cybersecurity risks?
Alvin Chia: Our product is based on three requirements: customize, control and safeguard. Customize is about being an open its platform. Control is the ability to manage all installations with one central hub. But very important is the safeguard the third one and one of the most important changes we have made in our operating model.
We develop our software based on security policy. It has to be secure both by design and by deployment This year we joined companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Google, Apple, IBM etc. Partnering with an organization called the CVE. We have partnered in the CVE program, and the CVE (Common Vulnerability and Exposures) program’s aim to find, describe, and catalogue Known cyber security issues.
We work with organizations worldwide to find and share these vulnerabilities and to make sure that we are able to help IT and cybersecurity experts work together to fix these issues. We also do very regular, annual penetration tests performed by the third parties not just by us to identify vulnerabilities that could impact whether it’s confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information.
We are looking very closely aligning with responsible technologies, and our system is built on GDPR and privacy principles. Lastly, we use encryption standards that are FIPS compliant. It is used in highly regulated industries and governments, especially the US government. So, all in all, this really encapsulate how important cybersecurity is to us and how important it will be continued in the future.
Electronics Era: How does Milestone video technology support healthcare & environments by enabling security and operational efficiency, aiding in patient safety, and ensuring secure, monitored environments in hospitals, which aligns with India’s focus on improving healthcare standards?
Alvin Chia: Healthcare is definitely a very important, not just in India. We have a shortage of nursing staff and doctors globally. The doctor-to-patient ratio is insufficient.
Milestones contributions are obviously focusing on safety of the premises, the safety of hospitals, and also aged care facilities. That’s one thing, and more importantly, it’s about the operational efficiency between nurses, doctors, and patients. Video technology can allow us to deliver the same level of care to more patients at the same time.
Today nurses have to walk 15 meters to the nearest patient, maybe a hundred meters, maybe three floors up, or maybe two floors down, to engage the patients they are assigned to. But with video technology, they are able to manage more patients at the same time by using the connections to the patient within their room. This is directed directly to their location at the nurse’s command area. More importantly, it’s about how we do that in a way that is compliant. We have privacy blur we’re enabling privacy blur to make sure that we are not violating individual privacy rights, we also ensure that no recordings are made on devices to maintain privacy with new technologies and by working with some camera providers.
There is the ability to detect distress, such as falls, coughing or asking for help, as opposed to just talking to their neighbors or family members visiting them. We are able to detect the differences between these situations and push those triggers to the doctors and the nurses quickly.
We are also working with further technologies such as LIDAR technology because, in some places, even with privacy blur, patients do not want to see a camera in front of them. LIDAR technology is a new technology that does not involve looking at a photographic image of a person but instead uses what we call radar or LIDAR images to detect whether a person has fallen. Audio recognition is also used to detect distress. These are some of the technologies, together with technology partners, will improve the both security and operational effects efficiency within healthcare facilities.
Electronics Era: As a world leader in developing and innovating data-driven video management software (VMS), cloud and AI-driven analytics, both in and beyond security, what are the future trends you are looking for?
Alvin Chia: There are few trends that we know already happening. One of them is called cloud, and cloud has been around for a while. How we work with the evolution of cloud?
Whether it’s on-premise, full cloud, or hybrid, we are building our video management software to be able to work across any configurations the customer requires. That’s one of the future trends one that we are working towards in terms of our product development.
Another trend is AI, especially Generative AI as one of the fastest-growing technologies across the entire world. We are working very closely with our technology partners to ensure that we are diving deep into the key use cases that will be required in the world tomorrow.
But Milestone is also taking a very strong stance on responsible technology. We want to be able to, or rather, we want to work with partners and customers who are using video technologies to improve the lives of humans and not to use them in a way that is against human rights & policies.
At the end of the day, technology should serve people – not the other way around.
