With Lorenzo Gaudenzi, Sales and Marketing Manager, Alkeria (Pictured)
What’s new at your company?
Right now Alkeria has completed and will soon start distributing its new CELERA camera family, featuring the unique dual-USB3 interface we have developed. New partnerships are also on target, for both increasing our worldwide distribution and developing vertical applications together with OEM customers.
We are also working on extending NECTA—our line scan series —with higher resolution sensors and CELERA with a "lighter" solution. A totally different camera family is also in our 2017 roadmap. In order to complete this, thanks to the good start of NECTA, we are expanding both our R&D team with new engineers and our marketing and sales force.
What areas or applications do you see the most growth for both your company and the industry overall?
More than application areas, we are finding lot of difference in geographic regions: a significant part of overall contacts we are getting come from India – where we are establishing some partnerships – and many other emerging countries show a lot of interest in vision. However, speaking about application areas, we see increasing interest in food sorting, textile web inspection, and medical diagnostics.
What are some interesting ways you’ve seen your product deployed recently?
Most of NECTA applications right now are in web inspection systems for paper and in cutting machines. Another relevant field of application for Alkeria cameras is OEM diagnostic instruments, but we are committed in granting the privacy of our customers for these applications.
How (if at all) have market changes or trends affected the way you approach new product development?
Alkeria chose to stick to the recent USB3 standard. We fully trust in the growth of this standard in the market. Another subject we are taking into consideration is the request for "all inclusive" solutions from emerging countries: this is leading to partnerships with other vision components manufacturers, in order to be able to provide a network of services and products along with cameras.
There are a lot of headlines about autonomous vehicles and drones right now. How do you think this impacts the vision industry both now and going forward, and does your company plan on getting involved?
Vehicles and drones are two application areas where "what to do" with images will be more important than “how to acquire them”. It will probably be a market for high volumes, highly standardized and low cost cameras, and likely the software development will drive the market.
Cameras like those used for industrial vision focus too much on quality and have too many technical restrictions. Maybe drones are a market still to be defined and will have more space for a company like Alkeria. In fact, we already had contacts in that application field but for now it is still not our main interest.
What is your take on the current state of the machine vision market?
Machine vision will for sure benefit of the growth of emerging countries that will join the machine vision philosophy and adapt their manufacturing processes to higher quality requirements.
What is your latest product and for what reason was it developed?
Our latest introduced product is the CELERA family; it was developed for one of our OEM customers in the pharma market. We needed an area scan camera with high performances, keeping our commitment to USB3 and allowing our customer to save system costs due to Camera Link frame grabber and cables; the best way to fulfil the requirements, fully exploit the CMV (CMOSIS) sensor capabilities and match Camera Link performance was basically doubling the USB3 stream and bandwidth.
This allowed to have a top performance camera in the same compact, high quality, rugged format of the NECTA series; it is a showdown of Alkeria expertise with this interface, allowing to get highest performances avoiding the cost of Camera Link cables and frame grabbers.
Do you have any new/exciting products on the horizon that you can talk about?
Beside some OEM co-developments, we cannot talk about, our 2017 roadmap includes a new budget camera family - in the entry level range but still equipped with USB3 - as well as extending NECTA and CELERA families with higher and lower spec models.
View more information on Alkeria.
Share your vision-related news by contacting James Carroll, Senior Web Editor, Vision Systems Design
To receive news like this in your inbox, click here.
Join our LinkedIn group | Like us on Facebook | Follow us on Twitter
Learn more: search the Vision Systems Design Buyer's Guide for companies, new products, press releases, and videos
