Avigilon Corp.
Congratulations to Avigilon Corp., #3 in 2011's Most Innovative Companies in B.C.
(More: 2011 BCBusiness Guide to Innovation)
It’s hard to get around the pure entrepreneurial slaughter that is Avigilon’s story. The company builds high-definition video surveillance systems that can be found today in prisons, hospitals, schools, sports arenas, nuclear power plants, banks, car factories and many other sites around the world. A 2010 study by Deloitte & Touche LLP ranked the 120-person firm as the fastest-growing tech company in Western Canada and the fifth-fastest in the country. Avigilon CEO Alexander Fernandes estimates its systems are now handling more than 60,000 video feeds in 60 countries. And that’s after less than four years on the market.
But it’s important to remember that behind all this growth is a core innovation. (In fact, Avigilon was among Red Herring magazine’s 2010 picks of the 100 most innovative companies in North America.) Fernandes is a veteran entrepreneur with a background in high-definition video. His previous company, Quantitative Imaging Corp., made machine optics, selling to hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical companies and other high-end scientific users. He couldn’t understand why the security footage he saw on the six o’clock news was always such poor quality. So he began studying the world’s $10-billion video surveillance market, he says, and learned that it’s “extremely conservative, old-school and slow to change; they’re not adventurous in the least.”
Now picture a serial entrepreneur with a carnivorous gleam in his eye. He sold Quantitative Imaging in 2002.
While Avigilon does manufacture a line of HD video cameras, that’s not its core business, Fernandes explains. Eighty per cent of what it sells is software. The true innovation that fuels Avigilon’s success is a unique system for data streaming, processing and storage that’s fine-tuned to handle the torrent of data that makes up HD video. Avigilon is better described as a data-management company than a camera company. In fact, Fernandes calls his company’s cameras, “an Ethernet appliance with an eyeball.”
A single Avigilon camera can capture up to 50 analogue variants of information. That means a wide-angle shot of, say, a 30-car parking lot is sharp enough to pick out licence plate numbers. And yet, Fernandes says incredulously, more than half of the security cameras manufactured today are still analogue.
But specs alone weren’t enough to breach the conservative security market, he says; it took a three-pronged attack. First, an irresistible price proposition: a full security system with these superior cameras for half the price of competing systems. (To keep costs down, Avigilon control systems are all built with commercial computer and networking equipment.) The next prong is flexibility. Avigilon systems work with a wide range of pre-existing surveillance hardware, so new customers can switch to Avigilon’s data-management and archive systems without having to replace their old gear. Finally, Avigilon targeted big-name clients to win the trust and acceptance of the marketplace.
So Avigilon has really solved two big problems: how to build a superior, low-cost surveillance system and how to infiltrate a conservative marketplace. And there’s one sure metric showing that it has succeeded on both counts, according to one of our panellists: “They are absolutely killing it in the market.”
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