By Thomas Jensen, CEO, Milestone Systems

Our world is changing fast. From one day to another, it feels like we are seeing sweeping changes in how we live and how we work, all as a result of accelerating development in technology. One very current example is how the COVID-19 pandemic has made the benefits of video technology even more apparent and accelerated its use during the global lockdowns.

Many of the changes are positive. They bring us closer to each other and provide us with new and better tools for businesses and everyday life. But we are also facing global challenges because of some of these changes. Challenges brought by the rise of megacities and growing urbanization have led to the need for greater security and increased surveillance to keep society safe.

These challenges call for innovative solutions in the way we use technology, particularly video technology. To illustrate what I mean, let me give you an example of how video technology is used to improve the environment by monitoring traffic in smart cities. In the old world of ours, traffic was just about speed tickets and red light violations, but video can do so much more. In our rapidly urbanizing cities, video allows us to gather real-time data and analyze it to create actionable information that we can use to re-direct traffic flows during rush hour. The outcome is reduced congestion and therefore reduced air pollution. Being used like this, video technology is a valuable tool to make the city environment a better place for citizens to live; and push down CO2 emission while we still have time to do so.

If Moore’s law only tells us one thing, it is that video will get even smarter, faster, and less expensive. The cloud, 5G, and Machine Learning will advance video in novel ways. We will see video being integrated into more and more devices, sensors, and everyday objects. One area where we see video technology having a large impact is in accelerating the development of the Industrial Internet of Things and automation.

During the near-term future, advances in technology will help us to make society a better place for people to live. At Milestone, we are strong advocates for the advantages that this will bring, and at the same time we are acutely aware that with great technology comes great responsibility. We need to make sure that technology is used for the common good and for the benefit of society as a whole.

As I see it, the challenge is more than technology; our way of thinking, how we do business and the way we behave as companies, are important parts of the answer. This is something we take very seriously at Milestone; in fact, we see this as an obligation. Doing business the right way is simply the ethical thing to do.

As a global leader in video technology, our business goal is to achieve long-term sustainable growth together with our partners. Doing this the right way means we have to accomplish two things that are equally important:

• Help our customers to optimize their business processes and protect their assets
• Make society wiser, safer, and better place for us all to live.

Our dream is to do our part in helping to make society a better place for everybody to live. As a video technology company, together with our partners, we do this by empowering people to make sense of; and extract actionable information from video data. That’s what we mean when we say we “Make the World See.” It is very important for Milestone that everybody that we work with and do business with to reach our dream, behaves in an ethical way. We are one company, we are not a government or an international NGO, but that does not mean we are powerless. In fact, we want to be a lighthouse for the industry when it comes to responsibility. That’s why Milestone is committed to do business in the right way, and we expect our customers to use our video technology in the right way – responsibly.