Introducing Ava Aware—The system to rule all your security operations

I’m delighted to announce that we’re making the Ava Aware video management system available to the world. We envisioned an industry-changing video management system to empower security operators to detect threats as incidents unfold, minimize damages, and conduct powerful investigations faster and more accurately than ever before. Today, we turn our ambition into reality.

Before we started our journey in the physical security space, we needed to see what organizations needed the most when they installed a video surveillance system. We immediately noticed the massive number of cameras out there and the small number of security operators to monitor them. These cameras were recording 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The traditional solution always involved a human operator and a video wall with an overwhelming amount of video feeds. We asked ourselves: if a human can’t look at the footage, why even have cameras installed in the first place?

We realized that operators needed the tools to understand if something was happening live.

Next, we noticed the case of investigating historical incidents. Operators spent hours or days looking for suspects, tracking down their movements, or getting accurate results they could build compelling cases on.

Minor events should only take a few minutes of search until operators could respond effectively.

We didn’t want to be yet another video security provider; we tried to answer the needs of organizations who struggled to keep their premises and people safe. To design our products, we pinned down a few fundamental principles:

• pragmatic: our solution must make operators effective, not replace them;
• integrated approach: our analytics must be built-in, scalable, and cost-effective;
• easy to use: easy to install, manage, upgrade, license;
• advanced: leverage the latest technology on the market;
• secure from the ground up: we must prioritize cybersecurity features and privacy of data and people.

In the early days of Ava, we attended a meeting with a chief security officer of a school district in Alaska. Someone had set one of their buildings on fire, and they found out because a neighbor called to alert them. When the security personnel reviewed the video footage from one of the cameras, they saw the suspect trying to start the fire for 15 minutes. That was a defining “Aha!” moment for us at Ava. Video surveillance was one of the industries that needed real-time, actionable intelligence. Effectively applying artificial intelligence was the vehicle to achieve that.

With Ava Aware, we made pervasive and integrated AI-driven video analytics a reality. It’s a VMS that organizations can use with their existing third-party cameras to analyze all the streams, all the time, and in real-time. We have designed an incredibly efficient machine learning inference platform that, combined with the capabilities of Nvidia's Turing GPUs, allows us to support real-time analytics on up to 200 cameras per Ava security appliance.