Is GigE a goldmine?

It’s been more than eight years since George Chamberlain and Alain Rivard founded Pleora Technologies. At the time it must have seemed a highly speculative venture. Digital was all the rage and CameraLink was just starting to get a foothold in the machine vision world, so it’s easy to picture the venture capitalists asking how this little startup was going to find a niche.

Well the advantage of GigE is that it gives similar performance to CameraLink, but without the expense and complexity of a framegrabber. This makes it well suited to high speed and high resolution imaging. The downside, from the camera manufacturers perspective, is that they have to either develop their own GigE interface, (each image has to be converted into an Ethernet packet for transmission, then recombined in the PC,) or work with Pleora.

With the news today that Cognex is the latest company to enter into an agreement with Pleora, it seems the adoption of “GigE by Pleora” is gathering pace. So long as they can maintain a pricepoint that keeps a GigE camera slightly cheaper than the equivalent CameraLink ‘grabber and cam combo I see no reason why Pleora shouldn’t continue to grow and grow. In fact, as I peer into my crystal ball, I see Pleora as the Microsoft of machine vision.

And of the question I posed above? For George and Alain, I suspect GigE may turn out to be very lucrative. I’m just waiting for the IPO.