COPENHAGEN, Denmark — After a seven-year sojourn, Arcules is reunited with Milestone Systems in a move that will marry the two company’s video monitoring services to provide a more complete offering for its customers. Over the next several months, it will be business as usual for the two groups as they navigate reintegration, helmed by Milestone CEO Thomas Jensen, who is acting CEO for both companies. Jensen will be working closely with Arcules’ Andreas Pettersson as his position in the new combined company comes into focus. The decision to reunite the companies came about due to the organizations listening to customer demands and analyzing developments in the video surveillance market, including the transition to cloud services. “Video surveillance as a service (VSaaS) continues to grow rapidly,” Jensen said. “More and more customers want hybrid and pure cloud solutions, although demand for on-prem is strong and will remain so over the coming years.” Jensen said that as customers want greater flexibility and freedom of choice, the combined company will be able to offer that. “Now, Milestone can provide a full suite of video management software (VMS), video analytics and VSaaS,” Jensen said. “At the same time, we adhere to our Open Platform philosophy, so customers can truly mix and match to find the best solution for them thanks to the impressive suite of offerings from our technology partners.” Milestone also factored in the increasing consolidation of the global video surveillance market in making its decision to reunite with Arcules. “Arcules have been brilliant partners over the last seven years,” Jensen said. “By working together as one organization, we can combine Arcules’s specialist knowledge with Milestone’s global footprint to give customers an even stronger offering and drive more business for our channel partners.” Additionally, the reunion also combines each company’s pool of talent, paving the way for future developments at Milestone, Jensen says. “We see that artificial intelligence (AI) will play a greater role in helping end customers make data-based decisions, both within security and beyond,” he said. “Now, we have an even stronger pool of talent to help design, research, and facilitate such AI-based solutions.” Join us next week for the rest of our interview with Jensen, where he discusses capitalizing on the growth of the VSaaS market.