Under the agreement, Servian will be permitted to recommend VisualCortex’s Video Intelligence Platform, as well as deliver implementation, integration, model building, and associated professional services, to its current and future clients throughout Australia and New Zealand.

Servian was acquired by US-based multinational IT services firm Cognizant in January 2021.

Servian and VisualCortex have already collaborated to deliver computer vision outcomes for government entities and transport organisations.

Servian national managing partner David Emery said the partnership would help its Australian and New Zealand clients exploit and act on video-based insights at scale.

“The partnership with VisualCortex allows us to bring a platform approach to video analytics, meaning quickly focusing on the usage of data—and the insights and decisions we can make from it—instead of spending all our time on the engineering and integration.”

“Historically, analytics has focused on data from the core systems in our businesses. Video analytics gives us the ability to leverage data, which was previously untapped, to generate new insights about new areas as well as new perspectives on existing parts of our businesses. At Servian, we don’t see video analytics as a standalone service offering. We see it as part of the instrumental data backbone of an organisation. VisualCortex will help us achieve that vision,” Emery added.

VisualCortex CEO and co-founder Patrick Elliott said partnering with Servian was an integral moment in the company’s evolution, growing its reach and helping to service its customers throughout the region.

“As both an emerging technology and market, Gartner cites the top two challenges facing organizations undertaking AI projects—like Computer Vision—as a lack of skills as well as an inability to understand potential use cases and connect them to real-world challenges.”

“We know that Servian has the skills, and practical experience delivering real-world computer vision projects, to help organisations achieve business value quickly and great ROI over the long haul. Their deep footprint, trusted client relationships and large workforce will also help us scale fast, underpinning VisualCortex’s channel-based go-to-market strategy across ANZ,” Elliott added.

VisualCortex began life as a Servian prototype, conceptualised by Andy Huang (Servian associate partner and head of AI and ML) and initially built by Servian’s research and development team.

Following the sale of Servian, founder and former CEO Tony Nicol co-founded VisualCortex as a standalone company.

Servian’s former head of research and development Ben Evans was appointed chief technology officer and co-founder. With a core group of developers working under his leadership, Evans revamped the initial VisualCortex codebase to create an enterprise-ready video analytics platform.

Huang said the VisualCortex partnership would enable Servian clients to facilitate enterprise-wide computer vision programs.

“Unlike camera-side or point solutions—which typically focus on one video analytics challenge per deployment—VisualCortex delivers a highly performant enterprise-grade platform to facilitate any real-time or historical video analytics use case,” said Huang.

“Where VisualCortex offers significant value to Servian’s clients is its extensibility—it’s easy to deploy, use and add new use cases as they emerge,” added Huang.

“We’re able to leverage commodity hardware to perform video analytics at scale. VisualCortex can also be deployed anywhere clients desire – from on-premise and on-the-edge, to public and private clouds, or a hybrid approach. This means we get started faster and significantly reduce the barrier-to-entry for our customers. Through the platform approach, we’re also able to readily adapt to changing client needs,” Huang explained.

“Once we’ve started a video analytics project, we often find that three or four other use cases quickly emerge. With a range of intuitive dashboards and reports, combined with the ability to easily integrate video-based data generated in VisualCortex with other data sources, we see enormous potential to democratise access to video analytics throughout the enterprise. We want to enable our customers to realise the value across all parts of their organisation,” Huang continued.

“We’re particularly excited to see how we can help our transport clients enhance their computer vision capabilities with VisualCortex. We’ll do this across a range of use cases—from proactive incident detection and traffic flow management, to timetable optimisation and automated number plate recognition,” concluded Emery.