In February of 2021, ONVIF welcomed its first new steering committee chairman in nearly ten years: Leo Levit. In recognition of his first year with ONVIF, we sat down with Leo to discuss some reflections from the past year.

What have been the most important achievements of ONVIF in the past year?
It has actually been quite a year! In 2021, ONVIF surpassed 20K conformant products in our database and 500 member companies, which was a great validation of the critical mass of support from our industry and trust in ONVIF capabilities. On the specification side, we released to the market Profiles M for metadata and analytic events and Profile D for access control peripherals. We also introduced the add-on concept, which will make it easier for ONVIF to respond to new use cases with specifications and a supporting conformance process. For the first time, we also ended support for one of our profiles, Profile Q, which is important because it demonstrates that ONVIF evolves with the changing requirements – in this case, cybersecurity best practices – of the market.

Of course, many of these achievements have been the result of the hard work of members over the past years that have finally come to fruition, but I am very grateful to be able to shepherd these developments to the market.

As for 2022, what are the current projects and organizational goals?
We are looking forward to getting back to physical meetings and events. We just came back from ISC West, which was a huge success, and are looking forward to next month having face to face committee meetings in Orlando. From the specification point, there are a number of initiatives and working groups that are focusing on evolving communication protocols that will enable several use cases in security systems including the use of cloud components.

How have you seen the role and relevance of ONVIF change over the last year as a leader and over the last five years as an observer?
I’ve seen our organization change over time based on the feedback from the market. Depending on who you speak with, the responses range from ONVIF is the best thing to ever happen to security to ONVIF doesn’t work all of the time. The truth is usually somewhere in between, but depends a lot on your individual perspective! We are always looking at areas for improvement. Looking at ONVIF now versus before, we are able to be more responsive as an organization and I think we are well-positioned going forward for implementations of cloud technology, analytics and IoT, for example, as those trends continue and the technology matures.