ONVIF's Focus on Profiles at 2013 Annual Membership Meeting

ONVIF, the leading global standardization initiative for IP-based physical security products, hosted its annual membership meeting in late October in Shenzhen, China, held in conjunction with the China Public Security Expo 2013. ONVIF member companies who gathered for the meeting heard presentations on the forum's progress in 2013 as well as on upcoming releases, including the progress of Profile G for recording and storage, Profile C for physical access control systems and a host of other technical developments planned for 2014.

To illustrate some of ONVIF's successes in China, systems integrator Nanjing SEU Intelligence System Co. spoke to the crowd about a recent surveillance implementation at the Chongqing Yufu Building in Chongqing, one of the country's five major cities, located in southwest China. The ONVIF interface was used to successfully connect technologies from different surveillance providers to deploy a major surveillance system throughout the 45,000-square-meter building, which houses government organizations along with private businesses.

"Support from the market and the hard work and dedication of the committee and working group members has allowed ONVIF to achieve many major milestones over our five year history," said Per Björkdahl, Chairman of the ONVIF Steering Committee. "We intend to continue that momentum in 2014 by finalizing and enhancing the existing profiles and allowing members to initiate new profiles that have market demand."

The audience enjoyed three keynote addresses during the course of the day. Ron Raffensperger from Huawei Enterprise Business Group shared his thoughts on the virtualization of video surveillance data, Gary Sweeting of Microsoft spoke on his company's increasing collaboration with customers and partners and Dr. Shiliang Pu of Hikvison described the impacts of local and national Chinese interoperability standards on the video surveillance industry.

Two ONVIF working group members were also recognized with the ONVIF Award in appreciation for their ongoing commitment and work toward furthering the mission of ONVIF. Baldvin Gislason Bern of Axis Communications, was lauded for his work as Chairman of the Profile C Working Group, part of the Technical Services Committee. Takahiro Iwasaki of Canon was also recognized for his ongoing work as the organizer and chairman of numerous ONVIF Developers' Plug Fests.

Members also elected several new and longstanding members to various posts within ONVIF's committee structure. Ichiro Ogawa of Panasonic and Michael Luetzeler of Siemens were re-elected as members of the Steering Committee for an additional one-year term. For the Technical Committee, three new members were appointed: Hirokazu Kitaoka from Panasonic, Gero Baese of Siemens and Steve Wolf from Pelco by Schneider Electric. The Technical Services Committee retained three existing members within its ranks - Matt Powers from Anixter, Neelendra Bhandari from Honeywell and Scott Hudson from Pelco by Schneider Electric, while three existing members were also reelected to the Communications Committee - Tony Yang from Hikvision, Mike Mao from Honeywell and Stuart Rawling from Pelco by Schneider Electric.

The 2014 ONVIF annual meeting will be held in September to coincide with Security Essen, part of ONVIF's goal of hosting its events in different geographic regions to enable members from around the world to attend.