i-PRO Corporation developed and launched their IoT camera and video cloud service through software engineering transformation

i-PRO was established in October 2019 as Panasonic i-PRO Sensing Solutions and had changed its name to the name as adopted by the national brand of security systems, i-PRO, in April 2022. i-PRO supports safety and security around the world by providing solutions that leverage the video and image analysis technologies that it has cultivated since its days at Panasonic.

The first service launched is "i-PRO Remo" that was used for remote monitoring in security cameras. “Conventional video security systems are closed systems, meaning that the video cannot be viewed outside of the system's installed location. However, the company saw the growing need for remote access due to the COVID-19 Pandemic and set out to redefine surveillance cameras as IoT cameras and developed i-PRO Remo to control cameras with a smartphone app," said Hideaki Takahashi, Vice President, Corporate Software Head, Executive Officer.

i-PRO Remo consists of a network camera, cloud service and gateway edge storage with recording capabilities. The captured videos and footages are recorded in full HD high resolution on an edge storage or SD cards attached to the cameras, and the videos and footages from network cameras installed at multiple locations can be distributed through the cloud camera service and viewed in both live and on-demand mode.

In planning i-PRO Remo, the company appointed AWS as its technology partner for its media streaming services and adopted AWS as its main cloud provider. This was a radical change to our business model which was initially emphasized on in-house development.

“We decided to concentrate on hardware development, which is our core competence, while outsourcing other areas to our partners. In this context, we provide a platform that starts with the service model instead of the product.

We selected AWS because of its high affinity with the AWS/Amazon business model and i-PRO's corporate culture, as well as the benefits of learning advanced cloud technologies," said Takahashi.

Mr. Koji Kawamoto, Corporate Software Expert System Software Engineer, adds from a technical perspective that "The deciding factors were the wide selection of the IoT functionalities required as a managed service, and the fact that we received an exceptional customer service experience from the proof of concept stage and were able to quickly get a clear idea of feasibility through study sessions, etc.

Development of i-PRO Remo started in April 2021, and the service has been available in Japan from June 2022. The cloud camera service is designed and built with two key features in mind: ease of usage as end users can easily connect and stream media to the cloud and its security.

The connection between the smartphone and the camera was made with a few clicks by utilizing AWS IoT Core and Amazon Kinesis Video Streams, a video streaming service.

“We chose Amazon Kinesis Video Streams because of its standard implementation of P2P functionality that requires no router configuration and is scalable. This has made it possible to establish a remote connection in 1/10 of the time it used to take to set up the system," said Kawamoto.

In terms of security, the AWS Well-Architected Framework of design best practices is utilized to create a secure operations and management environment with AWS security infrastructure and security services. “This was our first time developing a system on AWS, but we were able to design it according to best practices and receive ongoing advice from AWS" said Takeshi Wakako, Corporate Software Expert Systems Software Engineer.

The i-PRO Remo. project also had an engineering reform mission to shift development from waterfall to agile.

“After becoming independent, I had more opportunities to come in contact with excellent companies in Europe and the U.S., and was shocked by the overwhelming speed of business, which is different from that in Japan. In learning about AWS development methods, we realized that we needed to sharpen three things: culture, practices, and tools for fast flow and immediate feedback, and we tried to put them into practice in the i-PRO Remo. project," said Takahashi.

Projects also include quality assurance and sales departments. We worked as an autonomous team with a clear vision of what we wanted to achieve.

“We used the development guidelines provided by AWS as a reference, discussing quality and action goals within the team until we were satisfied, and receiving constant feedback as we proceeded. AWS also provided me with opportunities to learn about the organizational culture and how to prepare myself to become a professional," said Takahashi.

In the development of i-PRO Remo., a scrum team of less than 10 people was formed to release a working system in two-week increments to obtain immediate feedback. We practice an agile development process where reviews and testing are also completed on a weekly basis. For tools, CI/CD tools centered on AWS CodeBuild were introduced to automate a series of tasks such as review, release, and testing. In addition, automated unit testing ensures that testing is completed automatically at the same time as development.

“In the past, 90% of our man-hours were spent on creating forms that summarize test results at the end of the process. With CI/CD, most of the work has been automated, allowing us to spend more man-hours on service development. As a result, I am able to do what I want to do as a developer, and my motivation has improved," said Wakako.

Engineering reforms aimed at transforming culture, practices, and tools have produced immediate results. Server software development efficiency improved by 2.5 times and process quality improved by 7 times compared to the previous model. Because the two-week cycle of Scrum development allows for immediate reflection to lead to the next goal, 27 issues were improved in the two months of this initiative.

“Previously, it took us three to six months to respond to requests for improvement from our customers. We are now able to respond to requests for improvement and UX enhancements on a monthly basis, which has greatly improved our customer satisfaction levels," said Kawamoto.

Future plans include the development of the industry's smallest class of AI network module cameras (exterior image at bottom of page) and cloud module camera services.

“By integrating this module camera into various products such as robots, products can be easily converted to IoT. We would like to work with AWS to help manufacturers and integrators transition to IoT for their products," said Takahashi.