ONVIF Hosts First Virtual Annual Membership Meeting

ONVIF, the leading global standardization initiative for IP-based physical security products, hosted its annual membership meeting late last month. Attendees heard presentations on ONVIF successes from 2014, including the release of two new profiles, as well as an outline of new initiatives for 2015, such as the planned release of Profile Q and a new client test tool.

The audience at this year's meeting, held via webinar, enjoyed a welcome from ONVIF Steering Committee Chairman Per Björkdahl, who spoke about ONVIF's growth, including its 500 members - now representing six continents - and more than 4,000 profile conformant products. With the successful releases of Profile G for recording and storage and Profile C for access control in 2014, Björkdahl said that with releases of future profiles, ONVIF will continue to build on its vision and mission that all security systems will eventually share a single interface.

"ONVIF's growth this year indicates how vital our work is to the security and technology communities," Björkdahl said. "Listening to what the market wants and needs and obtaining feedback will be instrumental in our future development of profiles," said Björkdahl. 

Also speaking at the annual meeting was Stuart Rawling of Pelco by Schneider Electric, Communications Committee Vice Chairman, who discussed ONVIF's focus on building new relationships and on soliciting feedback from the physical security community at large in the coming year. Rawlings also presented the results from recent market outreach and emphasized ONVIF's desire to continually integrate such feedback into future profiles and technical support.

Andreas Schneider of Sony, Technical Services Committee Chairman, who updated members on the 2015 release of a Profile Q Device Test Tool, as well as on some of the features of Profiles Q - for faster installations - and Profile A for access control configuration, both currently in development. In an update from the Technical Committee, TC Chairman Hans Busch of Bosch noted the success of this year's Developers' Plugfest, which was the largest yet, and announced plans for two Plugfests in 2015.

Members also selected representatives for ONVIF's committees. Neelendra Bhandari of Honeywell was named to the Steering Committee, along with Michael Luetzeler of Siemens. For the Technical Committee, Honeywell's Ramesh Subbiah, Pelco by Schneider Electric's Steve Wolf and Siemen's Gero Baese were elected. The Technical Services Committee's newly elected representatives are Bob Dolan of Anixter, Neelendra Bhandari of Honeywell and Scott Hudson of Pelco by Schneider Electric. ONVIF's Communication Committee includes Finn Wu of Hikvision, Mike Mao of Honeywell and Stuart Rawling of Pelco by Schneider Electric.

With more than 500 members and more than 3,700 conformant products, ONVIF is the largest organization of its kind in the world. Since its inception in 2008, the organization has seen its membership grow by 25-50% each year, with the number of conformant products increasing by 250% in the last three years alone.