Jacek Węglarz, Training Manager and Evangelist, Dahua Technology
Jacek Węglarz is Dahua Technology’s Training Manager and Evangelist – spreading the word about latest and greatest technologies over almost 30 countries during The Starlight Show and other upcoming technology-oriented shows. Living by his motto “Do it with passion or not at all” he uses his experience in the CCTV field combined with his love for modern technologies to share the knowledge in a simple and entertaining way. The education he received in Poland, the USA and Taiwan in both technology and management fields allowed Jacek to have a better understanding of the industry itself, whilst being able to communicate the message effectively regardless of the cultural background of his audience. The mission is to raise awareness about the challenges of the CCTV industry, reminding the audience how to pick the best camera and explaining how Dahua has been answering those challenges with its latest inventions. During the time between the shows, Jacek devotes himself to testing new cameras and solutions, as well as recording real scenario videos that prove the highest quality of the products, often in difficult or unorthodox scenarios.
a&s Adria: Dahua is a world-known security company. Can you present its current position, stats about its status in video surveillance industry, sales revenue, number of employees, etc.?
Węglarz: Dahua Technology is a world-leading video-centric smart IoT solution and service provider. Based on technological innovations, Dahua offers end-to-end security solutions, systems, and services to create values for city operations, corporate management, and consumers.
With more than 16,000 employees and over 50% engaged in R&D, Dahua solutions, products, and services are applied in over 180 countries and regions. Since the launch of the industry’s first self-developed 8-channel embedded DVR in 2002, Dahua has devoted itself to technological innovation and been continually increasing its investment in R&D, putting around 10% of its annual sales revenue into it. The company continues to explore emerging opportunities based on video IoT technologies and has already established business in machine vision, video conferencing systems, professional drones, electronic license plates, RFID, and robotics etc.
We have established more than 200 provincial offices in China as well as 54 overseas subsidiaries and representative offices covering the whole world to provide customers with fast and high-quality services. Our products are widely applied in key vertical markets such as public security, traffic, retail, banking & finance, and energy etc. Numerous major projects have been installed with Dahua solutions and products – China International Import Expo, the Rio Olympics, G20 Hangzhou Summit, the 28th and 29th ASEAN Summit, Recife Subway in Brazil as well as many others.
The company has applied for over 2100 patents, including more than 100 international patents. Dahua Technology has been ranked 2nd in the global CCTV & video surveillance equipment market according to an IHS report since 2014, and was ranked 2nd in “2018 a&s Security 50”.
a&s Adria: What are the latest technology trends which have the biggest impact on the security industry?
Węglarz: The hottest topics in our industry are usually technologies that make the security systems smarter, more effective and can take a big load off the human resources. Artificial Intelligent plays the fundamental role in shaping the future of security – already making it incomparably smarter and more effective than ever.
It also plays an important role in Dahua Technology’s products and solutions. Dahua has been engaged in the research and development in AI for a long time and has established advanced technology institute with experts and engineers dedicated in this area. We hope that AI can make up for some shortcomings of human beings rather than replace human beings. For example, we cannot find a suspect from massive videos whereas AI can identify the person by comparing his/her characteristics with a tens-of-millions static library within one second. At the intersection, it is impossible for the traffic police to focus on illegal vehicles all day, but our system can deal with various violations in real time, thus leading to optimized deployment of manpower and resources.
Taking AI as its core strategy, Dahua has developed deep insights into different industries with focus on face algorithm and video structuring algorithm. At present, AI is mainly used for incident post-tracking but in the future, AI will gradually develop to help people with danger pre-prevention. In the industry, video data extraction and big data analysis technology will become the mainstream, and video prevention will be carried out to deal with illegal behaviors. Based on this trend, Dahua has been exploring the actual scenarios to apply AI in various vertical markets, such as smart city, smart traffic, smart retail, etc. and combines it with industry operation to benefit our customers with true business values from integrated intelligent solution offerings.
As a leading video centric smart IoT solution and service provider, we will pragmatically drive the implementation of new technologies to help customers to take advantage of the market transition, enabling a safer society and smarter living.
a&s Adria: Can you tell us some of the latest Dahua technology developments for the year 2018-2019? What should we expect from Dahua Technology the next year?
Węglarz: In 2018, Dahua Technology launched “Dahua Heart of City (Dahua HOC)” strategy, a smart city development engine supported by Full Sensing, Full Intelligence, Full Computing, and Full Ecosystem capabilities, to realize the construction of a “1 platform, 2 centers, N applications” (1+2+N) new smart city framework for application at the city, industry, and commercial level. The strategy gathers together the company’s strong technological innovations, top-level security network architecture, and operation services capabilities, while forming end-to-end solutions with supporting technologies such as artificial intelligence, deep learning, IoT, within all areas of smart city operations, to promote development of smart city thus enabling city operations to become smarter, and satisfying a city life that calls for high quality.
To fully promote the implementation of AI technology for full range of smart products, Dahua aimed at customers’ demands in front-end, storage and center service to seek innovation and launched intelligent products. By combining with cloud computing and big data and relying on intelligent algorithms and chip technology, the Company has optimized products and solutions, enhanced customer value and innovative business modes. In 2019 and the following year, Dahua Technology will continuously increase investment in R&D and facilitate technological innovation in AI, cloud computing, big data, chip and other future core technologies and improve the capability of coming up with comprehensive end-to-end solutions to solve business pain points for customers based on “Dahua HOC” structure.
a&s Adria: What’s the biggest advantage that your company has over your competitors?
Węglarz: I like to divide my concept of our advantages into 3 “T”- Transparency, Technology, Targeting.
During the Starlight Show I always put a strong emphasis on transparency. As a technology company and even more importantly as a security provider, we need to play open cards about what we do. Not only does it build strong trust between our customers and us, but also gives them confidence to offer our cameras, knowing what components we use and how to pick the best camera. We need to speak on the same technology level to be able to compare hardware in a fair, professional way. As you can see during my show, I spend a fair amount of time talking about most important camera specifications to remind our partners how to find the best product before they get to hold it in their hands. I have spent hundreds of hours testing our products and preparing real, relatable videos for our customers to see the true technology advantage with their own eyes.
On the other hand, our competitors do not share our vision about being transparent. Some like to use tricky ways to market certain technologies, some like to purposely not include important variables in their datasheets, and some like to hide behind “trade secret” excuse when asked more in-depth questions about their hardware.
The second “T” is for technology – something that I am passionate about and can talk about for hours. Due to the fact that Dahua invests 10% of its revenue into R&D, we have been able to bring many breakthrough technologies to the market. We were the ones to bring Sony Starvis sensors to our budget Lite series, as we want best technologies to be available to everyone, because better image quality means more effective surveillance, which in the end means a safer environment. Dahua continuously brings newer and better sensors to the CCTV market – with our FullColor cameras as an example, you can see a colorful image at night when most competitors’ products switch to black & white mode. We are also the first to introduce a 4 Megapixel Starlight + camera series, yet again making Dahua the trendsetter. We patented a revolutionary ePOE technology that breaks records of transmission for power and data over UTP cable and even coaxial cable! You can power cameras and transmit the data using one cable for even 1 kilometer! This changes everything.
For analog systems, our proprietary technology brings the possibility to not only power the cameras and transmit video over coaxial cable, but also transmit high quality sound. The next chapter of Dahua’s breakthroughs starts with the world’s first Artificial Intelligence NVR – one compact device that can replace a farm of servers! Never before has it been possible to perform so many algorithms in one device that is affordable and easy to use – out of the box. Besides the already mentioned face recognition, the AI NVR can also recognize each person’s appearance by clothes color and type, making it a matter of seconds rather than hours to find the person of interest. Similarly, the device can perform car color and type recognition to optimize searching for specific vehicles. Because the human/car classification, the AI NVR also eliminated false alarms for intrusion detection –raising alert only when an actual person or a car appears in the camera’s view. I am looking forward to the future breakthroughs Dahua will bring to the market.
The third big advantage of Dahua over our competitors is the local targeting. We have been dynamically growing in local markets, expanding the teams and country offices to be able to offer a real local support and be closer to our partners. Those offices often provide professional hands-on trainings that result in certification for the attendees, local support teams, and of course project and sales teams that help the customers in each stage of their projects. To be able to fulfill the great demand for Dahua products, we currently have two sizeable logistics centers- in Poland and Hungary that on average hold 600.000 products! On top of that, we have launched a hi-tech assembly line in Hungary capable of producing over a thousand devices per day at the initial stage, and even more with time. The headquarter for Central and Eastern Europe and the Nordics is located in Warsaw, Poland – which hosts not only the management team but also Dahua Academy training room and a local RMA center that provides fast and efficient assistance to our European customers if needed.
I believe that with those 3 major advantages, we are quite ahead of our competitors. Of course, we work very hard to continuously grow and become even more competitive.
a&s Adria: There’s been lots of concerns about cyber security. What is Dahua Technology doing to safeguard its IP cameras from hacks?
Węglarz: I am very happy this question was raised, especially since there is a lot of rumors on this matter all over the internet and not so many facts. In order to provide the highest security level to our customers, Dahua has established Dahua Cybersecurity Center. DHCC was established to solve cybersecurity issues and aims to provide more robust and secure products/solutions for our customers. It consists of security vulnerability reporting, announcements and cybersecurity knowledge sharing with our global customer base. We understand how challenging it is in our industry to keep all the products secure and we put security at the highest level of priority. Dahua actually even hires professionals (some people just call them “hackers”) that search for any vulnerabilities in our products so we can fix them immediately. In other words, if they manage to find security bugs, we reward them for that.
Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT hereafter) is an integral part of DHCC. Dahua PSIRT is responsible for receiving, processing and disclosing Dahua product and solution related security vulnerability. It is the designated window to release information about Dahua product vulnerability.
From the user point of view, we implement special security requirements into our products to ensure the higher level of security. We do not allow default passwords- the user needs to set a more complicated one, and we indicate the level of strength to help pick the suitable password. In case of an attack, we have also developed password blast-proof technology which is a kind of password protection based on the idea of improving the attack time cost.
Our products also support end to end encryption, providing a secure data exchange between our products, at the same time helping our customers to be GDPR compliant. There are many more initiatives we take to ensure our products are protected from attacks. For more detailed information about how we do it and how you can make the systems more secure, go to our website www.dahuasecurity.com and visit the cybersecurity page. We provide hardening guides, white papers and many useful information on how to keep your systems safe and how we help you to do it.
