Avigilon Brand Guidelines: Vancouver’s HD Surveillance Maker, Owned by Motorola Since 2018

A camera entrepreneur takes high definition to security.

Avigilon was founded in Vancouver in 2004 by Alexander Fernandes, BCBusiness reported in May 2017. It was not his first camera company: in 1999 he had founded QImaging, a British Columbia business that built cameras for medical and industrial use and was sold three years later. The idea behind Avigilon, as the magazine described it, was simple. Digital video camera technology had moved fast in the early 2000s, but the security industry, one of the largest markets for that technology, was still dominated by analogue cameras. Avigilon set out to bring high-definition digital video to surveillance. A 2019 company profile in the trade magazine Manufacturing Today put it the same way, describing Avigilon as having helped move the industry from low-resolution analogue imaging to high-definition digital systems.

The company grew quickly. It went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2011, and BCBusiness placed it in its 2017 Top 100 ranking of British Columbia companies, with Fernandes still founder and chief executive. When it listed, the magazine wrote, its high-definition cameras faced few new rivals; that changed from 2012, as lower-cost cameras from Chinese makers including Hikvision reached the North American market in volume.

Avigilon’s response, according to the same report, was to invest heavily in video analytics from 2013, securing patents for automatic licence plate recognition and for searching footage by a person’s appearance. The magazine called it an end-to-end product offering, and noted that Avigilon then made its products in its own factories in Richmond, British Columbia, and Plano, Texas.

Resolution became a signature. In the 2019 Manufacturing Today profile, the company said it had sold high-resolution cameras of 8 megapixels and above since 2007, and that in 2015 it introduced a 30-megapixel single-sensor camera in its HD Pro line, which then ran from 8 to 30 megapixels. Large images need bandwidth, and the same profile described the software side: the Avigilon Control Center video management software, paired with the company’s High Definition Stream Management, SmartCodec and Idle Scene Mode technologies, which Avigilon said were designed to limit the load on networks and storage.

A separate unit inside Motorola Solutions.

In 2018 the company changed hands. On 1 February that year Motorola Solutions announced an agreement to buy Avigilon, then listed in Toronto, in an all-cash deal; its chairman and chief executive, Greg Brown, said video could act as “eyes and ears” for monitoring a location. On 28 March that year Motorola Solutions announced that it had completed its acquisition of Avigilon, buying all of its issued shares. The Chicago company’s release described Avigilon as designing, developing and manufacturing video analytics, network video management software and hardware, surveillance cameras and access control for commercial and government customers; the February announcement had listed airports, government facilities, public venues, healthcare centres, retail and critical infrastructure among the places its products were used. The completion release said Avigilon held more than 750 US and international patents and made its products in the United States and Canada, and that it would run as a separate unit of Motorola Solutions, still headquartered in Vancouver.

Motorola Solutions then added two more security businesses. Its release of 14 March 2023 lists them as Openpath, bought in 2021, and Ava Security, bought in 2022, and describes Avigilon as the capstone of its video security and access control business. That release launched a new Avigilon security suite “under a modernized Avigilon brand,” in two forms.

Avigilon Alta is the cloud-native suite. Motorola Solutions says it brings together Ava Security’s video portfolio and Openpath’s access control, and needs no infrastructure beyond cameras, controllers and readers, using cloud infrastructure that Motorola Solutions manages. Avigilon Unity is the on-premise suite, built on the original Avigilon portfolio: the Avigilon Control Center, Avigilon Cloud Services and Access Control Manager. Motorola Solutions says both can be run across several sites from a browser or a mobile device.

Design and documentation.

Access control is a quiet kind of design. Most people meet it as a small reader beside an office door, a keypad at a side entrance or a plastic card on a lanyard, and only notice it when the light turns from red to green. The makers in this guide build those readers, the cards and phone credentials that talk to them, the controllers and software behind them, and, increasingly, the cameras and video systems that sit alongside.

Much of the industry’s imagery comes from the building rather than the product. Pictures on company websites and in trade catalogues often show lobbies and turnstiles, staff badges clipped to belts, a phone held up to a door as a key, a guard desk facing a wall of video screens, and rows of server racks where the software runs. Some brands sell mainly through installers and integrators, so their pictures are aimed as much at the person fitting the door as at the person walking through it.

The trade meets at a few large fairs. ISC West in Las Vegas is where HID Global was introduced to the security industry in April 2006, according to the formation announcement reprinted by SecurityInfoWatch; Security Essen, held in the German city of Essen, is another fixture of the calendar. Trade titles such as Security Today and Benchmark report on product launches, new factories and the industry’s own awards.

Ownership in the sector ranges from family firms to divisions of large lock and technology groups, and several brands have changed hands more than once. This guide sets out what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it, and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name over two suites.

Today the Avigilon name covers a broad range. English Wikipedia describes the company as a Canadian subsidiary of Motorola Solutions, headquartered in Vancouver, whose products include network cameras in dome, bullet, pan-tilt-zoom, 360-degree and panoramic forms, video management software, licence plate recognition, video encoders, network video recorders and access control. It names two analytics features, Appearance Search and Unusual Motion Detection.

The 2023 relaunch widened what the name covers. Motorola Solutions described the new suite as combining technologies from three acquisitions, Avigilon, Openpath and Ava Security, all under the Avigilon brand; Openpath’s access control and Ava Security’s video now sit inside Avigilon Alta. The parent says the suites serve organisations of all sizes, and English Wikipedia lists enterprise, commercial, education, healthcare, retail and critical infrastructure among the sectors that use them.

For a design guide, Avigilon shows how a single founder-led camera maker can become the house name for a parent’s video security and access control suites. Compare Motorola Solutions, its owner since 2018, and Genetec, another Canadian video security software company. For this guide we use charcoal, mist and a steel blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Avigilon’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.