EXCLUSIVE: Q&A with Sanjit Bardhan, Arecont Vision

Arecont Vision director – Middle East, India and Africa Sanjit Bardhan details why the megapixel IP camera technology provider is backing the inaugural Hotelier Middle East Security & Safety Summit.

Why is it important for the company to support the summit?

We consistently believe in educating and articulating the value of megapixel technology to the market. So it’s about people understanding what the camera technology is all about and also understanding what megapixel technology is all about, and why it is beneficial for the market.

More and more, as people are becoming more conscious about technology, they are becoming more careful about what they want to see on their security systems.

Hospitality is one of our biggest and most successful working areas and one of the reasons why is that there are different cultures, nationalities and sexes that come and stay in hotels and obviously it is a high-profile target for a lot of malicious activity. When you’ve got a robust security system, that’s where the value comes in.
Our technology is also allowing people to understand how many people have visited their hotels, what kind of footfall they’ve had in their bars. As a result of this they can form new strategies based on their reports.

What kind of trends do you expect to see coming to light?

We’ve seen over the last few years that quite a few regions in the Middle East are governed by federal laws which dictate the fact that security needs to be robust in certain verticals. Hospitality is definitely a vertical that wants – and has been dictated to use – high end technology.

The governments wanted the hotels to be completely secure and the people to be secure. If you look at Qatar or UAE, there is a government law that says the security directors and managers in hotels have to install a certain type of resolution of camera. They can’t just use anything.

We’ve seen trends of security and safety getting more robust in the hospitality sector and people stepping up their security spend.

What are the latest launches from Arecont Vision?

We tend to say that we’ve got a product for every single vertical that exists. In the hospitality business, there are certain products can be extremely beneficial. When you start using megapixel technology, you are increasing the resolutions for security and reducing your overall number of cameras.

We’ve got a product in the market that can look at large areas. Some of those newer launches will be exhibited at the conference.

What can we look out for from Arecont through the rest of 2014?

We say that we are 18-36 months ahead of the competition in terms of what we bring to the market today. There are a lot of products that we introduced at IFC West in Las Vegas. We are also in constant development of newer products and newer technologies that will be very well used by the hospitality industry.

We can give a snippet of them during our presence at the summit by demonstrating some engineering model so they can see the benefits they would get.
One of the things I will show is a four-in-one camera. It’s four cameras in one box and they can look into any direction. Rather than installing four cameras, you install just one box. That’s already been booked in by lots of hotels.