Interview with Borislava Kenarova and Aleksandar Atanasov, Milestone Systems

On the occasion of the Milestone Integration Day Romania event, Borislava Kenarova, Sales Manager CEE (Central and Eastern Europe) and Aleksandar Atanasov, Channel Business Manager, CEE gave an interview to Securityportal.ro. Among the topics included are smart city, compliance with GDPR norms and future plans of Milestone on the Romanian market.  

Razvan Ionescu:  

It’s your third year in a row that you are present here in Romania for a Milestone event. Is this event simply a part of Milestone’s strategy or is the Romanian market mature enough to consume the progress made in the security industry at this yearly rate? 

Borislava Kenarova:  

I would say both. Romania is one of our focus markets in Europe. Actually focus markets are our emerging markets territory which is very big and it is part of our strategy to develop even more of the country. We see bigger projects every year and the market is constantly developing and growing. As I have mentioned before, during our 3 years of returning to this event, our yearly growth rate has been around 32-35% every year which are excellent figures.  

Razvan Ionescu:  

What would be the specific of the Romanian market as seen from Milestone’s point of view? 

Borislava Kenarova:  

I can’t identify any specific verticals because we already have some existing installations almost in all the verticals here in Romania, but I will say that this year our focus is around safe city. This is one of our focus area globally. We have some ongoing projects in the transportation industry too and critical infrastructures are also important. As you probably remember, last year we covered different verticals. Our approach and goals are to review the vertical solutions because we have specific challenges that the customers are facing in every vertical and we want to address them and share what our community partners have developed. In specific terms, I would say that the Romanian market is quite advanced because we have complex systems deployed and our Romanian partners are very proactive. Also, in our KickStarter project, which we are running for 3 consecutive years, this the second year when we have Romanian finalist as well.  This means that Romanian developers understand very well the Milestone’s solutions, want to develop specific integrations within the security market, like Parking Spotter or this year’s solution addressing drones. To sum up, Romanian developers and integrators are very active in this area.  

Razvan Ionescu:  

You mentioned earlier the idea of smart city, which is something that everybody talks about nowadays. How much of this smart city initiative is a marketing stunt and how much are you able to literally convert into projects?  

Borislava Kenarova: 

So this is the reason why we combine and say safe and smart city, because our vision is, in order for a city to be smart, it has to be safe first. I agree that it can be difficult but here in Romania we have a really good example with Parking Spotter product. It’s important that everyone feels safe in their own city and also be smart regarding transportation. It’s also important that people talk about it first and do a little word of mouth and then slowly implement the ideas. In Bulgaria we have some ongoing projects for smart transportation also. 

Razvan Ionescu: 

Do you find that it would be easier for these smart features to penetrate the private or the public sector? 

Aleksandar Atanasov: 

Both, in my opinion. These are very big and complex installations and it isn’t possible to choose only one of them. The projects are ongoing for years and using Milestone open platform you can gradually expand the system or add different elements, parking or any other intelligent system. We see this both in private and public sectors, so the base in our opinion is to start with the right platform and that will give you the possibility in the future to expand your systems for this smart feature.  

Razvan Ionescu:  

How is your Milestone platform adapting to the GDPR regulation? 

Aleksandar Atanasov: 

Milestone as a platform is compliant with GDPR. We should distinguish here again between private and public use, because public sector is sometimes exempted from GDPR. GDPR impact is greater in the private sector. Milestone has technical features for, let’s say, hiding faces and this feature can be a permanent privacy mask which can’t be lifted by anyone. Or it can be set so that only the admin can lift this masking for investigation purposes by authorized personal. We do have other privacy options and settings in place such as role-based permissions, profiles, rules for passwords or data exports. However, there is always an additional layer which lays with the final beneficiary who can add its own policies and procedures regarding data privacy.  

Razvan Ionescu:  

What can we expect from Milestone from the technical view and market approach. What are your plans for the near future?  

Aleksandar Atanasov:  

We have some exciting new projects that are going to be revealed in June but we can’t disclose them yet. You can expect some additional features in Milestone which may prove to be a real game changer.  

Borislava Kenarova:  

We want to improve even further our position here and strengthen our partnership with existing partners. We have around 30 active partners now but we see potential to increase this number. It’s important for us to have this vertical approach.