How far ONVIF has come, and how far it has still to go, were set out at a meeting at IFSEC, chaired by Professional Security editor Mark Rowe.
Opening the meeting, Jonas Andersson, chairman of ONVIF steering committee and a long-time senior man at Axis Communications, pointed out that standardisation initiatives usually take five to ten years. The fact that the first ONVIF-conformant product dated from August 2009, after the core specification came out only in November 2008, was a sign of how eager the IP security industry was for standardisation. The body had more than 100 members by the end of 2009, and as of May 2012, 380. Full members include the internet company Cisco. Jonas Andersson said it was one thing to say you support inter-operability; another thing to really support it. He pointed to the 1800 conformant products – cameras, encodes and management software and video recorders, allowing CCTV users to build different kinds of systems, with products from different manufacturers that can ‘talk’ to each other. ONVIF is expanding its scope to take in physical access control systems (PACS, with manufacturers such as Bosch and Honeywell). ONVIF is also co-operating with international standards bodies such as IEC and Cenelec in Europe. With a view to making ONVIF a truly global standard, the body has held meetings in China and the United States, besides at IFSEC. Next, giving the consultant’s view, was Ross Dorman. He spoke of end users with multiple systems, after five years, finding a mis-match of standards (in CCTV, access control and perimeter protection) across their organisation. The user than might have to pay third party companies to provide software patches, as ‘glue’. Typically, his consultancy works with the larger plc, perhaps in critical infrastructure. He said: “We experience day by day the end result of this – large organisations trying to implement non-standardised interfaces and platforms at huge cost; the cost runs into millions of pounds over three or four years, trying to correct some of these issues.” When the consultants explain ONVIF to such an end user, very quickly the users push for products that are ONVIF-compliant, perhaps with the aim of PSIM, making integration of systems natural rather than after a lot of specific integration work. Speaking next, Gary Wong of market analysts IMS Research, stressed there was scope for further development.
One development might be even more conformant products, as Jonas Andersson said that there was a need for a lot of conforming products, so that the end user could test them, and say which ones they wanted. Answering a question from the floor, Jonas said that ONVIF was having informal discussions with product testing houses. The speakers made it plain that installers have to become more savvy, as end users already are, as IP is seen more in the smaller end of the CCTV market. When asked by their customers about ONVIF, Ross said there were two answers – ‘yes, they can do it’, and ‘what’s ONVIF?’. Installers, he went on, were learning that the answer ‘what’s ONVIF’ could see the installer fall by the wayside. The nirvana, Ross said, was one standard, compared with analogue CCTV cameras that work to dozens. “My view is that the ideal route will be a single [IP] standard. Whether that is something that comes to fruition; I certainly hope so.” Gary Wong of IMS Research did not mind if there were two or three such standards: “The market will decide.” Asked to sum up, the three speakers stressed that ONVIF is still an emerging standard. Professional Security spoke at IFSEC to a UK former policeman now a security consultant who volunteered the fact that he would not work with a manufacturer that was ‘not ONVIF’, because he did not want to work with non-ONVIF companies that tied users to their products. That consultant has had to do some convincing of one client ‘who had been sweet-talked’ into taking a non-ONVIF manufacturer’s products. The consultant felt so strongly about it that he told the client that if they insisted on the non-ONVIF manufacturer, the consultant would walk away (though sending in his invoice in good time!?). And as one IP CCTV manufacturer put it at IFSEC, UK installers are ‘generally somewhat fearful of IP’. In other words, the ‘fear factor’ was installer ignorance of networks.
