SURBITON, UK—VCA Technology, a specialist in intelligent video analysis software based here, has officially entered the video analytics market with the launch of its new family of analytics products.

Explaining the decision to enter the analytics market, VCA Technology CEO Geoff Thiel said his company’s main objective is to “bring quality analytics to the mass market” that are also relatively easy to use.

While acknowledging that analytics today is never going to be “exactly simple,” Thiel said that some manufacturers seem bent on making things unreasonably difficult, with engineers designing systems in such a way that it’s necessary to understand the algorithms and the effect of all the interrelated controls. With IT literacy in the security industry still an issue, “the easier you can make it, the better it will be,” said Thiel. “We’ve avoided any algorithm controls; the tracking algorithms just tracks, and that’s the end of it.” That allows users to concentrate on just setting up the rules of whatever it is that they’re looking for, he explained.

Established just two years ago, VCA Technology may be a new company, but founder Thiel and his team have experience in the field going back more than 15 years. Thiel was involved with analytics when he served as technical director for PI Vision, a predecessor company that did a lot of work for the UK Home Office and the British government. That company, however, was sold and the new owners lost interest in the analytics work. “In a way, for the commercial market, we were too early,” said Thiel.

By 2007, however, things had changed, and when the opportunity came up to jump back into the market with South Korea’s UDP Technologies, an original design manufacturer of video components and CCTV solutions, Thiel was ready.

Today, VCA Technology’s VCAsys software can be embedded into edge devices such as network cameras, uploaded into video management and recording systems, or controlled directly from a PC.

The new suite of products comprises the basic VCAPresence and the more advanced VCA Surveillance. Both products feature tracking capability, allowing the user to detect and track objects, while VCASurveillance includes a tailorable rules engine, with which users can define objects, direction and speed of movement and other behavioral indicators.

The entire range of UDP’s cameras and encoders will have the entry-level Presence built in at no extra charge, while those requiring more advanced rules settings can upgrade to VCA Surveillance.

With the product launch under its belt and projects underway, including a Swedish railway deployment, Thiel expressed satisfaction with where the young company is today. “We’ve got quite a few takers beyond UDP,” he said, including UDP customers and independent people who are taking the PC package and OEMing that and building it into their own DVR product.

Looking ahead, Thiel said he was working on a series of training videos to cover things like basic system setup. To address the problem of overselling, which many believe plagues analytics, he also plans to produce something to address where the technology both can and can’t be used. In that regard, Thiel likens the technology to a tool in one’s toolbox. “If you use a hammer for every job, you’ll probably be disappointed sometimes,” he said. Likewise for analytics—“you use it when it’s appropriate,” he continued. “Unfortunately, there’s not much informing going on about what ‘appropriate’ means, and it’s far less obvious with analytics than it is with a hammer.”