Glance January 2007

The market for machine vision and bio-medical imaging components is always changing; what has seemed to be a sensible route to market often needs to be re-evaluated.

Image Management Technologies was originally conceived almost seven years ago as a Manufacturer's Representative which would act as a direct sales force, targeting image processing OEM customers. This offers a lower cost of sales model, than the traditional distributor and provides key OEMs with a more direct communication channel to the sub-system manufacturer. At that time there were around 70 specialist machine builders who had based their systems around vision technology. In addition there were around another 500 customers (including Universities, research companies and other users) who bought the technology on a consistent if intermittent basis. The industry had a major exhibition (IPOT and Machine Vision in February) where everyone went to see what was new.

Over the past few years this has steadily changed. The number of large OEM customers has declined partly due to the reduction in the UK manufacturing base but also much lower cost components so that, while the volume purchased by the OEM has remained stable, the value has declined. This is driven by a move away from dedicated hardware (for example imaging boards from companies like Alacron and Datacube) to PC based processing and the decline in the framegrabber market with the acceptance of Firewire, USB2 and Gigabit Ethernet cameras, all of which use standard IT interfaces.

Vision show in Stuttgart

The Vision show in Stuttgart in Germany has grown from a similar size to IPOT to become the biggest machine vision show in the world and this is now where the majority of OEM customers go to see the latest innovations. In addition the use of machine vision techniques has expanded out of the industrial automation area into other markets like security and traffic control. These are where large amounts of machine vision components will be used in the future. However in terms of these total markets, imaging is just a small part of the total requirement. The organisations in these areas understand civil engineering, security, border/crowd flow management and running major IT projects; they do not employ vision engineers.

These changes have made us re-evaluate our business model. We want to keep the ability to act as the manufacturer's direct sales force into the key major OEM customers. In order for them to survive they need to reach the lowest possible manufacturing cost and additional margin in their supply chain is unacceptable. However we need to be able to provide a wider sales and integration solution for the new customers in applications like security and traffic management. We therefore have to increase our application engineering skills for these markets.

We need to find ways to reach these new customers. We have therefore decided not to exhibit at IPOT this year but to use the resources on targeting these different opportunities. We already know the key machine vision customers and we know that many of them may not be attending IPOT this year as they perceive little benefit. We need to re-profile our marketing activities to address the emerging markets which are not addressed by what is essentially a manufacturing technology show.

Vision Components

We also needed to look and see what products we should emphasise in the future. This has led to the difficult decision to drop Vision Components from our product range. Vision Components make excellent smart cameras for industrial automation, but their software platform requires a significant investment in C programming to realise an application. This is fine for a large OEM who can recover the development costs over a significant number of systems but it doesn't meet the more flexible needs of many of today's customers. In addition Vision Components have decided that they do not want to build cameras for security and traffic monitoring applications and we cannot afford the resources to support different hardware and software platforms for different markets. If you have a Vision Components requirement please email Jan-Erick Schmitt at Schmitt@vision-components.com.

Move to Matrix Vision

We have therefore decided to sell the mvBlueLYNX range of smart cameras from our existing supplier Matrix Vision; previously we had only sold their USB2 camera range. We will be issuing a product based newsletter in the near future which will go into more detail on the products we have available. If, in the meantime, you are looking for innovative, cost-effective solutions for any of the markets we address, please don't hesitate to contact us.