Academic reputation is a key driver for colleges and universities to attract the best students, but campus safety is becoming an increasingly important factor in the college-choice equation. Topping the list of safety concerns is the threat of gun violence at schools, which struck on a nearly weekly basis in the past year in the United States. Of the 45 school shootings that took place up to Nov. 19, 2019, 14 occurred on higher education campuses, according to a CNN report. The active-shooter-on-campus threat is real, and it's the primary threat that keeps campus safety leaders up at night thinking of new ways to detect, deter and react to such incidents. Other top campus crime concerns include burglaries, forcible sex offenses, vehicle theft, assault and robberies.

The biggest trend in video surveillance and indeed the security industry as a whole over the past several years has been the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and the revolutionary promise it holds for the market. What once seemed like capabilities reserved only for the characters of science fiction novels and movies, are quickly becoming a reality because of advancements in computing combined with parallel breakthroughs in machine learning technology. This has subsequently resulted in a renaissance for video analytics, which were frequently written off by systems integrators and end users as being an over-hyped solutions. Indeed, many of the vendors that offered video analytics as a standalone solution as little as a decade ago have now been largely relegated to the ash heap of industry history via company or patent acquisition. Now, however, the technology is once again flourishing with fresh venture capital funds flowing into an evergrowing number of companies.