Jesper Just Jensen, VP, Products, Milestone Systems speaks exclusively with ISJ.
Let’s start with our company strategy and product vision. We are here to make the world see and be the global leader in video technology. That’s our ambition both in the security arena – but also beyond it.
We enable learning from the past and understanding the present, but we’re also aiming to predict the future. Those ambitions in some part inform the choices we make within our product vision and strategy.
When Milestone acquired Arcules and BriefCam in 2024, we of course expanded our product portfolio, but what it also represents is the natural expansion of our overarching mission, enabling us to solve problems for much larger use cases and customer needs whilst, of course, continuing to extend Milestone’s own global reach.
And, when you think about it fundamentally from an XProtect perspective, the move allows us to better serve all types of use cases – from small organisations with less complex needs all the way up to large enterprise deployments with high levels of complexity and varying integration needs.
With this new portfolio, Milestone stands stronger than ever before. There are still a lot of customers that need on-premises infrastructure and solutions, but we are also seeing a big uptake in maturity and a general need for cloud-native solutions.
Between Arcules and BriefCam, we have two strong products, with strong integrations to XProtect that we will continue to develop, meaning we can offer companies fully-fledged, deeply functional products that scale at the edge with little or no hardware footprint. That’s a great combination!
The integration of BriefCam and Arcules also strengthened and diversified our workforce from both a cultural and knowledge standpoint.
Now we have more people with a deep understanding of video-software-as-a-service, technical business models and more, as well as people with different expertise within the analytics and insight spaces and a long-standing knowledge of the open platforms Milestone has grown with.
We will continue to grow our partner ecosystem, across all three products. It’s these combinations that are a match made in heaven in terms of providing continued capabilities to enhance value for customers. Furthermore, it’s fundamental that we as a company are aligned on core values.
It’s not about integrating two companies into Milestone – it’s about three companies coming together. It’s about understanding the values of each individual company.
There needs to be alignment on values, and we shared a lot already, both from a technical standpoint and from a cultural point of view.
For example, we believe in responsible technology and, as we move forward, there are some ways of working that we are finding a lot of common ground on. This will continue to make it easier for us all to work together.
There are a lot of developers who want to create AI-enabled solutions, but unfortunately, they face two major problems. One, access to enough high-quality video to train AI models – whilst they can of course try to scrape the internet and find something, it won’t provide the quality of video they need.
Two: In line with new regulations is the ever-growing need – as an AI model developer and a solution developer – to be able to explain where you got your data and how you trained it.
The need for regulatory compliance and real-world video data for AI model training is what Project Hafnia is about to solve. With Hafnia, we are creating the world’s largest video library.
A library that is not only compliant, but provides data lineage, which is crucial for developers to ensure the data is ethically sourced.
That last point goes without saying, because we are of course not sharing video with personalised, identifiable information; we anonymise and utilise a synthetic layer.
It’s important that customers know that when they are sharing video with us that we are operating responsibly, in line with regulations and with a full commercial licence.
I mentioned responsible technology earlier, and this is at the core of our aim to become a global leader in this space.
The Brighter AI acquisition aligns with our corporate strategy, as today privacy and compliance are fundamental requirements. We all understand blurring faces and other personally identifiable information (PII) but Brighter AI – and the technology they provide – is taking this above and beyond.
With its powerful real-time anonymisation technology it allows customers and organisations to leverage video whilst also giving developers secure, compliant and ethically sourced footage that they can utilise responsibly.
It’s a little bit like a reverse facial recognition process in that you can remove the PII, such as faces or licence plates. If you are an AI developer, you can utilise this video and continue in an ethically sourced, anonymised way.
There are a few key components. The first is our open platform mindset; it’s how we think and act as a company and as employees, particularly when it comes to interacting with our community. We believe in mutual value creation, it’s ingrained in our DNA.
The other is dedication to making life easier for the wider developer community, something we are ensuring is key to our strategy.
With our partner programs, mutual commercial benefit is fundamental; we see it as a necessity for maintaining successful and sustainable partnerships within our growing ecosystem.
Obviously, there’s a lot to be excited about, but I would highlight a few specific things here.
Over the past two years, we’ve all witnessed the rapid evolution of GenAI and transformative AI integrations.
We’ve discussed initiatives like Project Hafnia and the Brighter AI acquisition, but we’re also making significant investments in the technology stack behind our core products to ensure we continue delivering new capabilities responsibly and in compliance.
We’re also rebuilding our infrastructure and rethinking our target architectures to unlock new growth opportunities – for ourselves and for our developer community.
As an open platform, we’re always considering how our ecosystem builds on top of our tech stack. We’re also focused on making our products easier to install and deploy across diverse environments.
This is not a rip-and-replace strategy; it’s about guiding our broad customer base toward a more modern, future-ready foundation.
Beyond deeper product integration for our technology partners and developers, we’re leveraging the strengths of all three companies in our portfolio – now including Project Hafnia and Brighter AI – to deliver a more unified and powerful set of capabilities across our platforms.