Motorola increases cloud offering through the acquisition of Calipsa

Motorola Solutions (Motorola) recently announced it has acquired Calipsa, Inc. (Calipsa), a cloud-native video analytics provider based in England. Notably, Motorola is prioritizing its cloud-based video surveillance offering through a comprehensive acquisition strategy. This follows in quick succession of Motorola’s earlier acquisitions of cloud-based companies Openpath and Envysion last year and Ava Security the previous month.  

In a recently published Omdia report on the video surveillance as a service (VSaaS) and access control as a service (ACaaS) markets, Omdia identifies a growing trend that, as the video surveillance market increasingly adopts AI-powered analytics, a powerful platform that offers central management and integrates with other applications will become a key factor in VSaaS adoption. Analytics integrations enable end users to perform real-time inference analytics of high-level object types (people, vehicles, etc.), reducing false alarms and increasing environment understanding. The AI platform or functions in the cloud will become a value-added option for other businesses. 

Additionally, Omdia identified hybrid solutions that enable a proportion of the intelligence to be processed at the edge or choose to transfer parts of a video stream to the cloud as an efficient way to achieve better end-user experiences. Forecasting that globally from 2021 to 2026, hybrid VSaaS solutions will grow at a 33% CAGR. This deployment architecture offers a greater choice of applications and compatibility, a lower burden of bandwidth and storage, and more efficient analytics performance.  

“We believe AI, spanning from the edge to the cloud, is driving the future of video security,” said Greg Brown, chairman and CEO of Motorola Solutions. “With Calipsa, we can rapidly extend our intelligent analytics across any video security solution and support the accelerating trend of enterprises using cloud technologies to enhance safety and security.”

In the Omdia Physical Security 2022 Trends to Watch, the increased value placed on software was a key theme. This became particularly prevalent in the second half of 2021 when Agent Video Intelligence (Agent Vi) announced it had agreed to its sale to Irisity AB (publ), a Sweden-based publicly-listed AI video analytics company. The deal was for a total consideration of approximately $67 million in cash and shares to Irisity. A few days later, in September 2021, Eagle Eye Networks announced the acquisition of video analytics company, Uncanny Vision. To “accelerate the company’s leadership in providing AI and analytics to make customers’ businesses more efficiently and the world a safer place.” Following Motorola Solutions’ announcement, it acquired Envysion, Inc., a provider of enterprise video security and business analytics solutions for the quick-service restaurant and retail industries, in November 2021. 

It could be argued that analytic companies were being overvalued in a similar manner 10–15 years ago, but I would argue differently. The technology itself is the difference in analytics companies today compared to then. Previously, companies offered a relatively small collection of rules-based analytics—line crossing, loitering, people counting, object left object removal, and camera tampering—all with varying degrees of accuracy. 

However, today, AI object detection and recognition analytics can be varied to create thousands of different analytics. This enables analytics to move beyond whether an unknown object has crossed a line to actionable intelligence of the physical world. This also allows analytics to become increasingly verticalized and specialized, with new analytics being developed not just for safety and security but also for commercial operations and business intelligence. Thus, making the market significantly larger than it would have been with traditional rules-based analytics. The market has been opened to a whole new array of business cases that it was never open to before. 

The potential for what can be done with AI is so much larger than in the old analytics market, that the need or the value of the technology on the AI side compared to the analytics side is much higher because of that. This will be driving the value of analytics companies and why Omdia expects several mergers and acquisitions in the coming years.