Eagle Eye Networks Inc. has acquired Panasonic Cloud Management Services Europe B.V. (PCMSEU), makers of Panasonic CameraManager and Panasonic Nubo. PCMSEU operated the largest number of cloud recorded cameras in Europe. 

Panasonic Cloud Management Services Europe BV will be renamed Eagle Eye Networks BV and will function as the European headquarters for Eagle Eye — selling and supporting the expanded Eagle Eye product line.

“Our dealers in Europe have responded with overwhelming support for this acquisition. It will greatly enhance our sales and support efforts in the European market,” said Dean Drako, CEO of Eagle Eye Networks. “The strong and experienced team in cloud video surveillance at our new Eagle Eye EMEA
headquarters will make it possible for us to provide a tremendous level of support to all of our dealers in the region.”

Ken Francis, president of Eagle Eye, described the acquisition as fulfilling two main objectives: geographical expansion and addition to the technology set and the product platforms.

“Eagle Eye is very strong both in the Americas and in Asia, but we were not growing is rapidly in Europe, Francis said. “We just didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on all the areas, and with this acquisition we think we become the largest global player in the cloud video surveillance space.”

Francis said PCMSEU has a couple hundred dealers in the European theater, and a couple of them are large, multinational companies. 

On the technology and products side, Francis said eagle Eye is excited to market PCMSEU’s products in either the North American or Asian markets. 

 All of PCMSEU’s employees have been retained. The management team of Rishi Lodhia and Tijmen Vos are continuing to drive the business as managing director and technical director of Eagle Eye Networks EMEA. The addition of the full CameraManager and Nubo engineering and support teams will greatly enhance the size, scope and investment by Eagle Eye in cloud video solutions worldwide, the company reported. 

“This is an obvious merger where we are going to be a one-stop shop for cloud surveillance products,” said Lodhia, who described the move a strategic shift to allow them to continue focusing on the company’s cloud platform. “After the acquisition by Panasonic, my co-partner Tijmen Vos and I remained in the business; we were driving this business very much as a service provider company.” 

Lodhia said their main business was software and the cloud service behind it, and so the partnership with Eagle Eye was their choice to further that business. “We decided to make strategic shifts. Our goal was always platform first. Our goal was to be an open platform, so we decided to convince the Panasonic corporate management to spin-off and sell the business. That was our choice as the management of this company. We, together with the Eagle Eye management team, built a global strategy to make this happen, and Panasonic granted us this opportunity.”

The Panasonic CameraManager product will be renamed Eagle Eye CameraManager. Eagle Eye plans to increase investment and support of the product to expand its sales globally for those customers that desire direct camera-to-cloud connectivity. The CameraManager solution does not have an onsite bridge device, as the Eagle Eye Cloud Security Camera VMS does, and can therefore be more cost effective for smaller camera counts per location. The company expects to quickly expand the global markets that Eagle Eye CameraManager serves.

CameraManager’s cloud surveillance products are popular amongst resellers and customers for their reliability, ease of use and rich feature set, including optional storage methods, motion detection, push notifications and cloud-based video analytics, Eagle Eye described, calling CameraManager “the ideal video solution for small and medium sized businesses seeking an affordable, quality cloud solution with small camera counts.”

Eagle Eye Cloud Security VMS will continue to be sold in Europe by Eagle Eye Networks B.V. for customers that require a large selection of camera interoperability or need more than a few cameras per location. Eagle Eye Cloud Security Camera VMS currently supports more than 1,000 different digital cameras, more than 10,000 different analog cameras, up to 10 years of video retention, and can handle very large camera counts.

Panasonic Nubo is part of the acquisition and will be renamed Eagle Eye NuboCam. The LTE camera has opened up the category of mobile video monitoring. It is an LTE camera that connects anytime and anywhere over a cellular or wireless network. It offers consumers and businesses the ability to see their valuables anywhere, anytime. The Eagle Eye NuboCam will continue to be promoted, integrated and enhanced. “We’ll probably take our time in the next three to six months and figure out exactly how we want to go to market with the Eagle Eye Nubo,” Francis said.

The combined offering of the Eagle Eye Cloud Security Camera VMS with the new Eagle Eye CameraManager and Eagle Eye NuboCam will provide Eagle Eye dealers the broadest product line available from any cloud video provider in the world, the company reported.

Francis said he sees this acquisition as a big accelerator to market adoption of cloud surveillance. “I’ve been on the periphery of the video and cloud space for five-to-eight years, but more actively involved with Eagle Eye for just under a year. What I’ve seen is an acceleration in the United States that is significant."

He went on to explain that the IT world is bleeding over into the security industry, and that although some U.S. security service providers may be hesitant to move site systems to the cloud, end users are starting to demand they do so. "They are starting to say, ‘I want a cloud proposal, please’; it’s been happening in the U.S., and I think we’re just starting to see it in Europe, and I think in the next 18-24 months it’s going to pick up significantly.”

The acquisition of PCSMEU will provide two additional datacenter locations in the Netherlands to support operations. The Eagle Eye Cloud Security Camera VMS is powered by multiple Tier IV datacenters globally distributed. The infrastructure has been specifically designed for video and is managed directly by Eagle Eye personnel. The datacenters also support developer activity for the cloud-based Eagle Eye Video API, which allows businesses and developers to integrate camera video into their applications without having to worry about a complex infrastructure. Eagle Eye Networks operates eight datacenters, located in California, Texas, Canada, Japan, UK and the Netherlands.