Video streaming company boosts critical decision-making insights with Azure Stack Edge

Footage of critical moments

Thousands of government, enterprise, and broadcast customers around the world, from the US government to BP to the NFL, turn to Haivision for state-of-the-art video streaming technologies. Its customers in the defense, public safety, disaster relief, and energy industries create and stream videos that contain geospatial metadata, which they need for decision-making in the moment. Haivision delivers live video that aids situational awareness through metadata in remote and bandwidth-constrained locations. “Our ability to deliver high-quality, low-latency video reliably is our competitive advantage,” says John Leipper, Director of Product Strategy at Haivision.

Customers in remote locations often need a broader understanding of events that are unfolding in real time, which can be satisfied with video streaming across mobile networks—a Haivision specialty. However, cloud connectivity is often very limited in remote locations, and customers in these areas can’t take advantage of advanced cloud processing to obtain a better understand of real-time events.

Compute on the edge

Haivision needed a way to continue ensuring low latency with timely and accurate data insights even in environments with intermittent connectivity so that those customers can generate the intelligence to drive informed decisions. The company considered several options and chose Microsoft Azure Stack Edge, a managed appliance that Haivision uses to access Azure compute, storage, and intelligence at the edge between the cloud and the physical world. Customers deploy the ruggedized device onsite to run Azure Cognitive Services for AI capabilities and cognitive APIs and to use the results locally when internet connection isn’t possible.

This solution augments and enriches the real-time metadata streams using Cognitive Services to extract intelligence and improve the information customers receive. “By choosing Azure, we gained object recognition capabilities for live video that we put in our own solutions—tuned to our customers’ needs—to quickly achieve more than we could by ourselves,” says Leipper.

Haivision also values the Azure Stack Edge compliance features. “Our government and enterprise customers in particular prioritize complying with the latest security standards,” says Leipper. “With Azure Stack Edge, we can deploy and manage security for our devices in a reliable, scalable way that supports customers’ compliance needs.”

Ensured customer confidence

Drawing on the live video object recognition capabilities in Azure, Haivision provides its customers with trustworthy information so they can proactively respond as events unfold and make smarter decisions. “By adding Azure Stack Edge, we now have the ability to take the best of the cloud, add machine learning capabilities, perform mapping from imagery, and enrich video with other metadata—all on the most pristine video quality rendition that we offer,” says Leipper. “We can distill data to extract the salient parts and then send out the most important information to the people who really need it.”

Those decision makers include people who need to understand situations unfolding around them in real time, such as police officers, fire chiefs, and humanitarian aid workers. “If we’re in a humanitarian aid situation and we need to find out where roads are blocked or count the number of people, we can load a specific cognitive engine for that,” says Leipper. “We empower decision makers with knowledge so they don’t have to wrestle with technology and can just get on with saving lives, opening up roads, and addressing other urgent needs.”

Faster time to results

Not only does Haivision deliver reliable intelligence to its customers, but it’s able to do it quickly, improving the user experience and decision-making time.

“Using Azure Stack Edge Rugged feels like we’ve put the cloud in a box, and our customers get to take those capabilities anywhere they need to use them,” says Marcus Schioler, Vice President of Product Marketing at Haivision. ”With Azure Stack Edge Rugged, we’ve opened up incredible possibilities with AI and Cognitive Services, helping us deliver more insightful, actionable, real-time video into our customers’ workflows.”

Because the ruggedized device is used at the customer’s location, data is processed closer to the source and results are delivered faster. “We’ve shortened decision-making time by being able to move the compute to the data rather than the data to the compute,” says Leipper. “With Azure Stack Edge, we get the best possible intelligence out of that data, much better than if we had to send it over satellite networks or line-of-sight networks back to a main base.”

Improved outcomes for customers

Haivision implemented this solution to deliver an outstanding service to its customers and offer them more data insights than ever with no added effort on their parts. “With our Azure solution, we aim to give our customers better insights so they can make better decisions in service of those who they’re trying to help,” says Leipper. “We bring our video expertise so that we can offer customers a turnkey solution within their existing infrastructures.”

Next, Haivision wants to add Azure Arc to bring Azure services and management to any infrastructure, use Azure Active Directory for identity management and protection, and explore how to further analyze its video streaming workflows to make them more efficient. “We’re just scratching the surface of what we can do with Azure Stack Edge, and we’re excited about what the future holds,” says Leipper. “Being able to deploy the cloud services we need to the intelligent edge device is truly powerful.”

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