As we enter 2026, we are proud to announce that the ONVIF conformant products ecosystem has eclipsed 35,000 conformant products. This milestone represents nearly two decades of collaboration with manufacturers, integrators, consultants and end users to create an environment where interoperability enables flexibility in choice of vendors and wide selection of products.
The more than 35,000 products that conform to our interoperability specifications are most definitely not an endpoint. These products conform to our current suite of profiles, which supports most of the major elements needed to build a comprehensive security system – integrating surveillance, access control and important functions such as license plate recognition, facial recognition, and other advanced analytics. As manufacturers continue to innovate and release new products that rely on ONVIF for interoperability, the number of conformant products will continue to grow. And as we release new specifications for cloud connectivity, AI and analytics metadata, and audio interoperability, we expect the size of our conformant products database to exponentially increase as we support the industry in transitioning to these technologies.
What exactly does this growth in ONVIF conformant products mean for you? Freedom of choice to select the best products for your application, from one of the industry’s most expansive “catalogs” of interoperable products. A manufacturing facility can select a thermal camera from one brand for perimeter detection, high-resolution camera models of another brand for quality control, and PTZ cameras from a different brand for production monitoring, all capable of integrating into a single management platform, regardless of vendor, using common ONVIF profiles.
Similarly, an airport deploying a security system can integrate wide-angle cameras with facial recognition capabilities for terminal entrances, license plate recognition cameras for parking and vehicle access points integrated with access control, thermal imaging for perimeter fence lines, and high-resolution PTZ units for monitoring gate areas and baggage claim from a host of different technology providers via ONVIF.
The Path to 35,000
When ONVIF was founded in 2008, proprietary protocols dominated the surveillance landscape. Organizations were locked into single-vendor environments where adding a camera from a different manufacturer meant replacing an entire system or accepting high integration costs. Manufacturers were forced to use these proprietary protocols during the IP investment boom, but this slowed the pace of innovation, as engineers spent valuable hours developing individual drivers between products instead of innovating new features or solutions.
Our first conformant products in 2009 enabled devices to communicate regardless of manufacturer. Since then, our ecosystem has grown steadily. At 10,000 products, we saw broad industry adoption. At 20,000, our specifications covered access control products, edge recording capabilities and metadata support. The milestone of 35,000 products reflects the expansion from basic device communication to more advanced requirements.
Despite all of this progress, our industry is facing integration challenges today that closely parallel those from 2008, specifically around cloud architectures. Closed APIs, vendor-specific integration requirements, and platform dependencies are creating the same constraints that we addressed for on-prem systems. Organizations that once faced camera-to-VMS compatibility issues now confront camera-to-cloud integration challenges.
We consider the stakes to be equally high. Cloud dependencies create more complex operational entanglements than on-prem systems. Data storage, analytics engines, and management functions become tightly coupled to specific cloud platforms, increasing costs and limiting flexibility in changing vendors. As cloud adoption accelerates, and organizations seek scalability, remote accessibility, and advanced analytics, without a standardized camera to cloud approach, organizations will face the same proprietary constraints ONVIF resolved for on-prem deployments nearly two decades ago.
Our Work in 2026
To that end, much of our work over the next year is focused on finalizing our cloud connectivity standards and applying close to 20 years of standardization experience to address these new but familiar challenges. Our cloud connectivity specifications will address how devices authenticate, stream and record video. We’re working with cloud platform providers, hardware and software manufacturers, and other industry stakeholders to ensure these standards reflect actual deployment requirements. This work builds on nearly 20 years of experience balancing manufacturer innovation with organizational flexibility.
Alongside cloud, AI and advanced analytics are changing how organizations use security systems, with computer vision algorithms detecting anomalies, classifying objects, and generating actionable insights. Our standardization work is looking at enabling flexible architectures across on-prem and cloud deployments without single-vendor dependencies. Our AI and analytics metadata standards can ensure that insights generated by one system can be used by another without proprietary translation layers, extending the value of an AI investment and preventing analytics from becoming another source of dependency on a single vendor.
While this work is focused on leveraging the benefits of AI, we are also finalizing a standard that can protect surveillance video from generative AI and deepfakes using authentication technology in the camera. Our video authentication specification enables cameras to cryptographically sign video at the point of capture, ensuring that the security footage can be verified as authentic and unaltered. This is critical to maintaining the integrity of video evidence in security operations, investigations, and legal proceedings.
The third prong of our 2026 focus is audio interoperability. Security systems increasingly integrate audio analytics, two-way communication, and ambient intelligence capabilities using audio sensors. We’re developing specifications to enable organizations to select audio-only devices based on their performance and feature sets, as opposed to those from specific manufacturers that have already created proprietary integrations between audio devices and VMS platforms. This will increase a security system’s ability to capture threats in blind spots where visual surveillance is compromised and improve our industry’s technological capacity for proactive vs reactive security.
As our cloud, AI metadata, and audio standards gain adoption, we expect substantial growth in conformant products—not just more devices, but products that enable more flexible deployments across hybrid edge-cloud architectures. For those specifying, designing, deploying, or managing physical security systems, our work on standards continues to address vendor choice and system flexibility both today and for the future.
Interested in getting involved in our standardization work on cloud, AI or audio? Click here to find out more!
