VisualCortex Scales AI-Powered Video Analytics With SUSE

Sydney, Australia — March 21, 2025 — SUSE®, a global leader in innovative, open and secure enterprise-grade solutions, today announced that VisualCortex has adopted SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage to scale its AI-powered video analytics platform.

From retail and hospitality, to transportation, manufacturing, and government, VisualCortex provides video intelligence solutions including heat mapping, traffic flow optimisation and number plate recognition to its customers. It has a unique video analytics platform that runs AI-powered computer vision models to make sense of data in real time. To support the company’s growth, SUSE is helping to streamline container management, improve edge deployments, and provide high-performance storage.

When VisualCortex began developing the platform, it recognised that containerisation was essential for the scalability, efficiency and reliability needed to support AI/ML workloads. The company opted for Kubernetes, but handling Kubernetes clusters across multiple locations had its challenges.

“Because we use edge computing when deploying to clients, we need to coordinate clusters across many different physical locations, which adds extra layers of complexity,” said Ben Evans, Chief Technology Officer at VisualCortex. “What’s more, many container management solutions are tied to a single cloud provider with high costs. We needed a platform that could support AI/ML workloads at scale across multi-cloud, edge and even air-gapped environments. SUSE’s Rancher Prime hit the mark perfectly.”

In addition to its robust management capabilities, Rancher Prime includes built-in security features such as centralised authentication and access control, helping VisualCortex meet stringent security requirements. Rancher Prime now serves as the main container orchestration layer in the VisualCortex platform.

Building on its success with Rancher Prime, when a major Australasian retailer asked VisualCortex to develop an AI-driven vehicle recognition engine (VRE) for car park management, storage became a challenge. The system needed to process thousands of vehicles’ data per day, replacing error-prone manual tracking while improving accuracy and revenue collection.

Before implementing SUSE, the retailer’s parking system relied on manual checks, leading to errors in vehicle identification and lost revenue. The solution needed highly scalable, resilient and low-latency storage capabilities to efficiently record the details of thousands of vehicles visiting the retailer’s locations daily—and do so with near-perfect accuracy.

“In our experience, persistent storage is one of the toughest things to get right with Kubernetes,” said Evans. “In the past, we have used cloud-based block storage, but that wouldn’t make the grade this time, as we were storing data at the network edge.”

Within the car park management system, SUSE Storage plays a critical role, storing a database that records data on all vehicles that enter and exit each retail location, including their arrival and departure times and registration plates. Using this information, the retailer can then automatically calculate parking fees for collection.

With SUSE Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage, VisualCortex has been able to improve vehicle recognition accuracy and manual corrections significantly, while also being able to increase weekly parking revenue at a single retail location. Customer complaints about mischarged parking fees have also dropped, thanks to better accuracy and fewer system errors.

AI to boost public safety and EV adoption

Beyond car parks, VisualCortex is currently researching and trialing new AI-based methods for enhancing public safety and detecting violence, as well as for commercial use cases such as retail store journey mapping. One retail project is looking at analysing EV adoption rates through license plate recognition, ensuring better planning for charging stations.

Evans added, “as we expand our AI capabilities, SUSE will play a central role in our ongoing operations. We have had an excellent experience using Rancher Prime and SUSE Storage, and they have helped us to scale our portfolio and bring our groundbreaking video analytics platform to many more enterprise clients.”

“VisualCortex is an example of how AI can deliver real-world impact, from reducing manual processes to improving customer experiences,” said Ben Henshall, General Manager, Australia & New Zealand at SUSE. “AI is only as powerful as the infrastructure behind it, and our approach to open-source means VisualCortex can build, scale, and innovate without constraints—whether at the edge, in the cloud, or wherever AI takes it next.”

About SUSE

SUSE is a global leader in innovative, reliable and secure enterprise open source solutions, including SUSE Linux Suite, SUSE Rancher Suite, SUSE Edge Suite and SUSE AI Suite. More than 60% of the Fortune 500 rely on SUSE to power their mission-critical workloads, enabling them to innovate everywhere – from the data center to the cloud, to the edge and beyond. SUSE puts the “open” back in open source, collaborating with partners and communities to give customers the agility to tackle innovation challenges today and the freedom to evolve their strategy and solutions tomorrow.

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