Secure Logiq, a UK manufacturer of servers for HD Surveillance applications, is celebrating its 10th anniversary. Since its inception with a handful of people in 2011, the business has grown to have 26 employees today and serve clients globally.
Secure Logiq’s tagline is ‘The fastest performance, biggest storage most resilience and best value.’
Benchmark interviews Robin Hughes, Secure Logiq co-founder and evangelist, to learn more about its history and its direction.
Robin opened the converation by pointing out: “The real differentiator between us and our competition is that first, and foremost, we are video people, so we don’t just understand the IT hardware we are supplying but the entire ecosystem around it.”
Benchmark: Can you describe your company in three words?
Robin Hughes: Simplifying complex solutions.
B: How can Secure Logiq ensure it provides the ‘Fastest Performance, the Biggest Storage, the Most Resilience, and the Best Value in HD processing and storage technology’?
RH: Great question! Testing, testing and testing is essential.
We have two great tools: Logiqal Benchmark, a virtual environment that replicates the entire IP surveillance system and provides proof that the server hardware is fit for purpose; and Logiqal Healthcheck, which provides the professional security installer with a complete suite of management tools to ensure, their global customer CCTV estates are secure, optimised and fully operational at all times.
Apart from our expertise, most of our intellectual property lies in the software modules behind our products.
B: Did Secure Logiq start with HD, or did it serve other formats too?
RH: By the time we were formed, most new Enterprise CCTV systems were specified as HD. HD video requires much more processing and storage than analogue video. Still, we have plenty of systems in the field where the legacy analogue equipment has been migrated to IP via encoders with later cameras added to HD.
B: Can you explain why do we need video servers instead of regular servers?
RH: Our industry is ‘big data.’ There is nothing more data-intensive than video other than multiple streams of HD video. The application requires an entirely different approach than a server that processes emails, word documents and excel spreadsheets. Most of these files are much smaller than a single HD image, let alone 200 HD cameras recording in real-time for 30 days or longer.
B: Does the appearance of AI and analytics running in real-time put strain on video storage?
RH: No, it doesn’t, but it does put a strain on video processing.
An adequately designed server for processing and storing video can easily handle 300 HD cameras. Still, the same server could likely only manage 20 channels of video analytics, which is why we have a completely separate range designed and optimised for video analytics – more processing powerful GPUs but little storage. We won a Benchmark innovation award for this range in 2019.
B: What is the impact of the cloud on your business?
RH: The network infrastructure isn’t there for cloud storage of an entire enterprise CCTV system, it is something we are thinking heavily about as technology is moving fast, and one day it will be a reality, but the short answer is that we don’t care where the server is it will be the same server requirements on or off-premise.
B: In April 2021, you announced a partnership with Gaichu Managed Services to offer your solutions and services globally. What made you decide they were the right partner for you?
RH: Historically, we provided all of our support in the UK and mainland Europe. Due to Brexit and the pandemic, it became logical to outsource the onsite support to a third party with engineers in the country. Gaichu’s model suited us. We have many layers of mission-critical resilience built into our servers. Logiqal Healthcheck can give alerts of any potential problems, so onsite repairs are rare. We needed a contract that reflected that rather than paying a large upfront sum for a service we hardly used.
B: What other partnerships have been vital for Secure Logiq over the years and why?
RH: We value our partnership with Stratus and Toshiba. Toshiba has made sure we got their products despite the limitations that the pandemic brought.
B: How much has Secure Logiq grown year on year?
RH: We saw a 65% growth last year, and we expect a similar number for this.
B: How difficult is it to convince distributors and integrators to work with Secure Logiq? What challenges do you face today in this respect?
RH: It’s easy, our business is built on knowledge and expertise in video and IT, and these are skills that aren’t always present in our industry; we do a lot of hand-holding pre and post-sales that saves integrators hours of design and engineering time, that is the real value add.
B: What sets Secure Logiq apart?
RH: We know we need differentiators, which is why we have invested heavily in a design service. We don’t want customers to come to us with a server specification. We want them to tell us about their system parameters, and we will design the best solution for the application. We offer detailed system drawings and full technical submissions as well as a system design guarantee. This comes all included as a free service.
B: What do you think will be the most significant security trend by the end of 2021?
RH: I think 2021 really will be the breakthrough of Video analytics, new technologies such as fave mask detection, social distance measuring are flying in the current situation, and as the world moves to remote working better, more clever monitoring of sites on and off-premise becomes a reality.
