October 2025 ended up being a big industry travel month for me. First, I attended and wrote about Securing New Ground in mid-October. The next two weeks were spent in San Antonio, Texas at the Axis Connect & Converge Conference (ACCC), and in Austin, Texas, at the joint Eagle Eye and Brivo Cloud Security Summit.
Both events featured similar themes as SNG, but these were more focused on the integrator partners and delivering product roadmaps, trends, training and networking.
At ACCC, the theme of the week — delivered by Founder and CEO Martin Gren and Vice President, Americas Fredrik Nilsson — was being a “joy to do business with,” with a focus on four areas that all started with the letter “T”:
“This is our take on what it means to be a joy to do business with,” Nilsson said. “Trust, and our responsibility to manage technology trends and continue to invest in R&D to bring out new things so you can continue to grow your business; then, focus on reducing the time it takes to install and maintain those things.”
At the Cloud Security Summit, there was a retro music theme, including an end-of-event, 90s-themed afterparty. However, the overall event was a big-picture look at the current state of cloud, AI and the many ways they could help their integrator partners (resellers) adapt to the fast-changing landscape. The event featured many break-out sessions aimed at learning, training and previewing upcoming products to be announced next year.
Eagle Eye Networks Founder and CEO Dean Drako devoted his keynote to the history of AI and describing how it works in about 10 minutes, noting, “It is going to change the world and our business, but how and why? It is transforming industries, but it is also a bit scary. … But understanding it is a good thing.”
In his keynote, “Security Value Remixed: the New Beats in Software, AI and Unification,” Brivo Founder and CEO Steve Van Till talked about how some of the most obvious realities are sometimes the hardest to talk about, first mentioning a few of the top 2025 SIA “Megatrends,” including the rise of software revenue, mobile credentials and cloud.
At ACCC, Scott Dunn, senior director of business development and industry relations at Axis as well as the current chair of SIA, also touched on some of the SIA Megatrends. He noted the ones he called “foundational” trends like cybersecurity, cloud models, workforce development, global tensions, sustainability, changing economic conditions and supply chain assurance. Then, he highlighted those he considered to be the top trends today, including evolution of the channel, AI, IT-OT security convergence, platform aggregation and managed service structures, the democratization of identity and mobile credentials, the growth of sensors, and the shift of influence from hardware to software.
Many of these themes — they are “megatrends” for a reason — showed up across all three events. But there were five key points that came up again and again at both conferences.
From being the first security video camera company to choose the open source and royalty-free compression standard AV1, to a commitment to partnerships with other manufacturers in the industry, Axis stressed the open nature of the company. “We made the decision on AV1 about five years ago,” Gren said. “We have a DNA that is always open, and this was an open standard.”
Axis has many partnerships on the video software side, with companies like Genetec, Milestone and Eagle Eye, and is also working with some of the same companies on its growing access control side. Steve Burdet, manager, solutions management for Axis, told SDM, “We love the idea of openness. We are really good at hardware, and, if they are a software company looking for good hardware, they will see that approach to openness.”
Van Till, speaking at the Cloud Security Summit, talked about why open is so important to end users: “Customers want to be able to pick out the best-of-breed. They don’t want closed ecosystems. They don’t want to be locked into one vendor, and they don’t want their data held hostage. They want to be able to take it with them. We believe the customer owns their own data.”
But on the access control side in particular, openness has had a rockier road than on the video side, particularly at the enterprise level with large, often proprietary, entrenched systems. This is something John Szczygiel, executive vice president and chief operating officer of Brivo, touched on in a one-on-one interview with SDM. “We would love to work with some of the bigger companies,” he said. “Access control companies often have an aversion to working with each other. My call is: let’s solve that problem. Let’s not force customers to contemplate a forklift upgrade or buy other solutions to bridge that gap. That is my open appeal to anyone in the access control industry.”
The open question was also raised in a thought-provoking way in a panel at the Cloud Security Summit called “Bold Statements, Real Debates,” moderated by Lee Odess, who suggested there is an open systems misunderstanding in the security industry. “Open systems are the ‘beard’ of our industry,” he challenged. “The industry has an obsession with the term ‘open’ when true interoperability is what the customer needs.”
Panelist Eric Yunag, executive vice president products and services, Convergint, answered, “I violently agree that open is a term that has been corrupted in our industry. It is just a proxy for, ‘I need modern technology. I want to integrate these things into the rest of my business.’ My position on this is we stand to forfeit at this moment huge portions of the future if we don’t get our act together as an industry. … We have had the luxury of inertia for decades, but that moment is upon us. … There are people coming into this industry who can move markets in ways we have never seen before.”
Despite the obvious contradiction that customers want both “unified” and “open” systems, Van Till pointed out in his keynote that the two are not mutually exclusive. “These are two contrary-looking trends: one is the open capability to pick whatever they want; on the other hand, they are looking for one place to go and one vendor to talk to when something goes wrong,” he said, comparing the experience to solutions like Alarm.com and SimpliSafe on the residential and small commercial side. “What people are looking for is the same degree of fluidity and functionality they are accustomed to in consumer systems,” Van Till explained. Brivo introduced its Open Suite last March, bringing together both Brivo and Eagle Eye solutions on one native platform, as well as working with other best-of-breed companies for solutions such as visitor management and more.
“Unified saves money,” Van Till said. “Companies that use suites cite cost efficiency as one of the major reasons. For those of you installing these systems, the same thing applies. … Your integration burden goes down.”
Burdet used a different term with a similar meaning: dashboarding, which is something Axis is focusing more on in its future roadmap. “It’s great to have a nice server, but even better to visualize it and understand it. For us, we are trying to make presets on a dashboard to make it more accessible and also tailoring it to the audience. What is necessary to security is different than what is necessary for marketing, so give them separate dashboards. … Clean it up and consolidate it using those open standards. It’s their data. Make it accessible.”
Matt Kjin, business development manager, future business, Axis Communications called these “experience technologies,” in a session called Unlocking Operational Intelligence. “Customer experience, residence experience, vertical experience, these … require the same foundational elements of the safety and security industry. They are making data-driven decisions based on security platforms.”
Dunn also touched on this in his presentation on the Megatrends at ACCC: “In 2023, there were 16 billion IoT devices; by 2030, there will be 32 billion,” he said. “The challenge is those IoT devices need to be connected to something to get value and data out of them. Nobody buys all of these from one company. In our industry, that translates to a single pane of glass and dashboards.”
End user Steve Dunning, physical security program manager for motor vehicle manufacturer Cummins Inc., reinforced this idea in a talk at ACCC: “These cameras are intelligent devices that can do so much more than just video. … I need buy-in from my business, from IT, from cybersecurity and legal. We need to all come together and say, ‘How do we use these devices to help the business?’ Now it is a business intelligence device.” He noted that he was looking forward to the upcoming dashboards, as well as stressing the importance of a strong relationship with the security integrators his company works with.
On the integrator side, another of the “Bold Statements, Real Debates” session topics at the Cloud Security Summit was about the value the integrator can bring to the end user business, with Chris Gilbert, founder and president, Security Pros, noting, “I sometimes have to cover up security and talk about business operations. It is a hard transition to take the customer from a security problem to a business operations tool in a one-hour discussion.”
Convergint’s Yunag added, “As leaders, I think one of the most important things we navigate is that customer journey. If you understand that deeply and align products and services to that, you can create value for the customer that you get paid for.”
In his discussion on top trends, Van Till talked about the rise of software revenue, later adding, “Software means cloud. In the case of access control, in 2000, there was zero cloud revenue. Now we are heading towards approximately 70% penetration of cloud revenue replacing on-prem by 2030. You might think you are already following this trend, but there are a lot of new, non-core, non-traditional software capabilities we are offering that we don’t see going out to all the customers.”
Later, speaking with SDM, Van Till expanded on that idea, speaking specifically on mobile credentials, with the example of the Walmart director of security at SNG, who explained that the cost, even at $1 per month per person, is still prohibitive when you have 2.1 million employees. “I had an epiphany when he said that,” Van Till said. “If you are running a security budget, there is no way to get a company to spend that. We are putting it in the wrong bucket and comparing it to the wrong things. Let’s say your target is really HR department and what they are dealing with on a daily basis. Health insurance, expense line for time off, sick leave. For each employee, they have a pretty high budget per employee. … I think we as an industry need to say we have been selling this into the wrong person’s budget. We need to sharpen the value proposition for HR and the people in administration who are concerned with the employee experience and retention.”
But software — or cloud — sales is a different animal for many traditional security integrators, and many of the educational sessions at both events were designed to help adjust to this type of selling.
Brivo’s Szczygiel told SDM in an exclusive interview that his top advice is to stop selling “RMR” as a concept. “Can we stop calling this RMR? If you went to a donut shop and instead of the prices it said, ‘This is my 100% gross profit margin product,’ what would you think? Don’t think about what it does for you; first think about what it does for the customer. … First put in your mind that you aren’t selling because you want the outcome. … You are selling a valuable service that you happen to be billing on a monthly or annual basis. Once you get the mindset right, then you can go sell it.
“Part of the sessions here are bringing the community together to explain how it works,” Szczygiel added. “There are a number of fundamental things. Ownership has to be committed. Subscription services are the future. Step two is: ‘what do I need to change about my business to accommodate that model?’ It is a recurring invoice. The tendency is to underpay [commissions] on subscriptions. Smart owners figure out how to pay more in subscriptions as an additional incentive.”
Cloud was also a topic at ACCC, with Gren mentioning that Axis was a proponent of cloud early on, launching a cloud-based platform two years ago, as well as working with other open cloud-based systems. The company also announced its own just-launched, cloud-first VMS.
There was also talk about the model shift. “When it comes to as-a-service models, we are moving in that direction,” said Kelly DeLeo, director, business development and services, Axis. “We are working through the channel. Many of you are trying to figure out how to offer this, how to offset the loss of revenue from maintenance contracts with managed services models.
“There is a trend towards servitization,” she added on a later panel of top leadership. “We as a security industry are a little slower to that adoption. One of the biggest challenges as an integrator community is how to bring that into our business.”
Not surprisingly, a dominant theme at all three conferences was the impact of AI.
At the Cloud Security Summit, Drako’s history of AI covered the three main “eras” of AI:
Drako compared the “artificial intelligence,” which currently has about 200 – 500 million artificial “neurons” to the human brain, which has about 86 billion. “So we are operating at roughly 1% of human brain capacity right now,” he said. “What does the industry want to do? Get as smart as a human.”
While that is not happening in the near future, he did cite several examples of how AI can “think” about context now as opposed to just identifying a hot dog or not, including Eagle Eye’s recently released AI-based brandished gun detection product, which was on display in the solutions lab.
“There is a lot coming down the road leveraging this transformer model AI,” he added. “The interesting thing about this model is the size and scale of it. It has huge business and practical applications for all of us. By next year, I expect it to be around 2 billion [artificial neurons], and there is a race to see who can get to something really, really smart, potentially smarter than a human.”
But this race and the investment in it isn’t cheap. Drako cited estimates to train ChatGPT 5 one time at about $10 billion, and the next version might be up to $50 billion. “Investment in AI is larger than anything I know of in the history of mankind. The numbers are staggering,” he said. “There are going to be around 10 – 15 giants in the world who will have these AI models, and we will all be using them. The numbers are in the trillions of dollars now, not billions. … What does this mean for us? Cloud and AI will dominate. You won’t be able to run all of this at the edge.”
The consensus at both events was that the AI model for the immediate future is more of a hybrid approach, with some elements done at the edge — such as the camera identifying a possible gun — and the rest in the cloud — to determine whether it is a gun or something else.
Drako closed his keynote by saying, “As a reseller you are going to get asked about this and you have to figure out how to configure and deliver the solutions customers want. Video surveillance is going to get a lot more complicated. But opportunity awaits. Our business, the video surveillance and access control business, will grow dramatically, so explore it; learn it; and enjoy it.”
At ACCC, the conversation around AI centered both around how it can help with camera imaging as well as what it can do for the video industry specifically. “It has been a long journey,” Nilsson said. “We did video motion detection at the edge, but we didn’t call it AI. It was basic analytics. … What we see more now is that all the basic analytics are in camera or VMS, then there are applications on top of that.”
Nilsson noted that the Axis Artpec-9 chip has deep learning at the edge. “Should we call it AI? I prefer to call it analytics. … It has build-in object detection and can do a lot of detailed search,” he said. “Using that word [AI] gets people’s attention but really it is all about what it does.”
There were a lot of conversations both in and out of sessions about what to do with AI.
The ACCC conference featured a panel of partner companies delivering computer vision and AI solutions through the company’s open systems to provide operational intelligence. “There is a difference between AI and computer vision, and a lot of people are scared of that,” said Zack Lima, founder and CEO, WaitTime. “Don’t just insert the word AI into sales because it is AI, but show how it actually solves a problem that is universal. It is there to augment, not replace. … It is important to really understand what customers are thinking about when they use the word AI. Right now, they mostly think about a chat bot. Visual intelligence isn’t the same as chatbots. Really, the point is what problem are you trying to solve so we can get the right tool? Asking, ‘Is this AI or not?’ will not help our industry.”
Fellow panelist Roger Milford, CEO, AiDant, recommended leaning on experts to try to figure it out. “People are trying to understand the difference in AI and that all AI is not the same. We are involved in computer vision, and AI is just a tool in that,” he said. “The founder of Ali Baba was asked, ‘Is AI going to take my job?’ He said, ‘No, but someone who knows and understands AI will.’ My message to you is come tell us what you are trying to solve. … You don’t have to understand exactly how it works. … Integrators that don’t start to leverage AI will get behind. Guys that do carry on will be the ones that lead the industry in the future.”
Ultimately, conferences like these are for the attendees to learn more about the products, roadmap, and, most importantly, talk to each other about their challenges, and offer best practices and advice to one another — what Burdet of Axis called “crowd sourcing” knowledge. “It is clearly why we host this and what people keep coming back for,” he said of the ACCC conference. That was the case both informally over lunch or beers later, as well as in some of the sessions offered.
At the operational intelligence panel at ACCC, Cyrus Shaoul, co-founder and chief evangelist, Leela AI, said, “Integrators really understand the customers best. The future is to have everyone here become the bridge between the customer and companies like us developing these solutions for the Axis system. … That is all of our homework for the next little while. Get that level of confidence so you can go out and say to your customers, ‘Have you heard what is possible now?'”
At the Cloud Security Summit, a few panels in particular focused on ways the security integrator could get more comfortable with everything from leaning on one another for subcontractors to using AI in their businesses. Investor Josh Baer, founder and CEO, Capital Factory, gave attendees some suggestions, such as using ChatGPT as a personal assistant, and having “AI Fridays” where employees share how they used AI that week. He also shared a Chinese proverb: “The best day to plant a tree was 20 years ago; the second-best day is today. So, if you are feeling behind on AI, start thinking now on how to use it.”
This concept was reinforced by another session, “How I did it: real stories from resellers using AI to grow,” where integrators shared concrete ways they have started to use AI in their business, from automating standard operating procedures and proofreading emails to building external agents to respond to customers.
Security Pro’s Gilbert — who, on the earlier Bold Debates panel, described his company as entering its “2.0” version — advised, “Let go of what you were doing. It is OK that this thing is smarter and faster than you are. Take all the information you have and load it into your model. … We are in a different game right now. We have to go from here to there really fast, so let go of yourself and your history.”
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