Eagle Eye Networks, Austin, Texas, announced the availability of its annual “Video Surveillance Report,” which produced interesting results regarding market trends in video surveillance. This year’s report was collected from video surveillance and information technology (IT) professionals, and the survey topics spanned the usage of video surveillance systems, cloud video surveillance, the role of IT departments and views regarding video surveillance systems’ vulnerability.

One notable trend was a move toward increasing operations support from video surveillance systems. “More than two-thirds of companies now plan to expand their use of video surveillance systems beyond security and into operations improvement,” said Dean Drako, president and chief executive officer at Eagle Eye Networks. “Additionally, there is a deepening involvement of their IT personnel in many aspects of video surveillance activities.”  Sixty-eight percent of video surveillance plans will include operations improvements following an upgrade or with the installation of a new system, according to the survey. It is interesting to note that number is more than twice as many as the survey respondents who planned to continue using video surveillance exclusively for protection purposes.

The top two video surveillance operations-focused analytics respondents wanted were analytics to improve sales or customer service (51 percent) and better management of employee productivity (44 percent).

Poor image quality (39 percent) led the way among top frustrations with current video surveillance systems, followed by multi-site incompatibility, and limited access to the video. View the slideshow above for the full results.

Survey participants also reported their company’s preference for the location of their video recording. Approximately two-thirds (65 percent) wanted at least some cloud video recording, while only 35 percent exclusively preferred on-premise (on-site) video recording and 44 percent wanted to deploy a mix of both cloud and on-premise recording. 

More IT professionals (58 percent) are involved in video surveillance, up from 51 percent when the survey was conducted in 2013. For those businesses where the IT group had a role in video surveillance, the most commonly cited role was network and server installation and support, at 44 percent. IT also played a role beyond installation and support, with close to a third reporting they were involved with security; storage management; system and camera selection, and video data analytics and operations.

The full survey results are available in the report.

Eagle Eye delivers on-demand, cloud-based security and operations video management system (VMS) providing both cloud and on-premise recording, in conjunction with a cloud video API. Eagle Eye offers secure, encrypted recording, camera management, mobile viewing and alerts — all from a 100 percent cloud managed platform. The Eagle Eye Security Camera Video Management System supports a broad array of IP and analog cameras using Intelligent Bandwidth Management, which makes it easy to deploy at single and multiple sites according to the company. The API platform uses the Eagle Eye Big Data Video Framework, with time-based data structures used for indexing, search, retrieval and analysis of the live and archived video.  For information, visit www.eagleeyenetworks.com.