Infoworld had an article this past week titled Why businesses still hate enterprise software. The article lists out a bunch of pain points but #1 & #2 on the list were the high cost of ownership and difficult upgrades. The strain a solution places on customer is often overlooked part of selection/decision math (see our ROI blog) but even if it is overlooked on the front end examination it’s a very real cost that customers will incur and as you can read in the article, they are increasingly pissed off about it.

Certainly there is some great software out there that was and will be delivered via the traditional client-server model. And at the end of the day customers should care about the net value a solution delivers (we’d actually look forward to helping customers with this examination). That said it is refreshing to see broader acknowledgement of the support costs that can come along for the ride. Additional costs beyond what you pay upfront can be rich and may include installation, configuration, maintenance, upgrades, change management, help desk, trouble shooting etc. Opportunity cost, another often overlooked area, also can penalize customers as they tie up resources and scarce mind-share that could have been devoted elsewhere with better returns.

Software as a service and Envysion’s managed video as a service specifically seek to address this challenge head on. We aim to put no strain on a customers IT group or network. Customers only need a browser to access our software and services they never install anything on any client computer or server. Envysion upgrades (which occur every few weeks) are delivered seamlessly and never require customers to lift a finger. Our application is built for every day use and the every day user so help desks and heavy training requirements are a thing of the past. Should a problem arise we have a fully staffed NOC.  Actually we proactively go after problems as we monitor and manage the service and fix issues as we find them.

For those out there frustrated with complex video software and/or want a solution that delivers more while straining you less – give us a call, we’d love to talk to you.

When it comes to video surveillance, customers face a dizzying array of options and performance claims. From traditional hardware suppliers (cameras and DVR’s) and security integrators to resellers and consultant and of course managed and hosted video providers – each has a value prop and a performance claim. The challenge for a customer as it considers alternatives is how to test these claims, make sure the service works for them, and quantify results so that a rationale business decision can be made.

Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of these claims solution providers were willing to work with the customer to determine what to measure, how to quantify improvement, and educate on how to use the solution effectively? What if this solution provider also took the extra step to actually work with your finance team to quantify and align on the return on investment? Sound like just what the doctor ordered? At Envysion we do just that.

Envysion’s managed video value proposition is to deliver rapid and significant profitability improvement (10-15%) for multi-unit operators. We do this by making video easy to use, putting it in the hands of more people across departments, and focusing operators on actionable business insight. The other half of the value equation is what we don’t do – we don’t strain your IT organization and network so there isn’t the support and overhead cost that can come with technology solutions. The install and set up is plug and play, upgrades happen by just logging in, management or administration resource requirements are non-existent.

For a customer looking at our solution the return on investment equation is pretty straight forward. It is the net change in profit driven by our application less any incremental IT support required (zero in this case) divided by the investment. While the calculation is pretty straightforward we’ve seen tremendous value from rolling out a prescribed pilot process and ROI methodology that both trains customers how to use our solution and then analyzes profit improvement and calculates ROI.

Most innovative solutions face a similar scenario –demos, decks and traditional selling are good, but customers want quantified proof of savings and proof that it works for them. So Envysion decided the best thing was to develop and author an eight week pilot process that literally walks a customer through how to implement our managed video solution and how to use it in day-to-day operations to drive profit improvement. While many companies provide training in the mechanics of a solution (functional how to), our pilot focuses on operational usage. Specifically how an operator would use the service on a day-to-day basis to improve operations and profitability. Along the way we identify any specific customization that would benefit a customer for a full roll-out.

The last bit is the quantification of ROI. While every vendor talks about ROI measurement we’ve learned that few actually calculate it. While the math is not rocket science it helps to have experience collecting and analyzing data and of course in packaging results so they make sense and are digestible. At Envysion we leverage the fact that we’ve got some management consulting experience on our roster and we burn the midnight oil to crank these out.

Its probably not a surprise that customers have responded very favorably to our prescribed pilot and quantified ROI approach. In fact, we have heard nothing but positive feedback from customers. More than a few have said that they have been waiting for years for suppliers to put in the extra effort to do this. Of course what our customers are most excited about are the results that our Envysion managed video service delivers. Typically it’s between 150 – 250 basis points of profit improvement and 300-500% ROI. With those results, we are more than happy to do the  work to make this black and white and show the incredible value we deliver.

The one last area I wanted to report back on from FS-TEC was the Video Surveillance breakout session from Day 1. I wanted to highlight Greg May’s presentation Let Me Show You the $ – The why, what, and how to a successful surveillance system.  Greg is the CTO of Paradigm Investment Group.  Greg’s presentation was a great playbook for multi-unit operators from a customer/operator perspective.  It hit on need, selection, installation, tips and most importantly value delivery.  Full disclosure here, he is an Envysion customer. 

I thought I’d share a couple quotes from his presentation that would be valuable for anyone considering a managed video solution:

Why do I need a surveillance system?
1. To monitor external influences:
• Hold ups; Robberies; Slip and Falls
2. To monitor Staff:
• Employee theft , harassment, worker’s comp issues
• Verify that employees follow operational guidelines
3. To provide assistance for remote technicians
4. Source of training video for best and worst case examples

How you see the $
When video surveillance systems are combined with business intelligence and a consistent monitoring solution, these systems can and will pay for themselves through loss prevention, staff performance and overall operational efficiency.

Great insight Greg, thanks for sharing!

It’s one thing to think you have a solid, professional sales team that is effectively representing your company.  It is much better to hear exactly that from a prospective customer!

We just wrapped up attending the Food Services Technology Conference this week (See Carlos’ post on the key takeaways)  We had our small but incredibly productive sales and marketing team at the show looking to establish and grow relationships with some of our key target customers.  One of these prospective customers, Todd Michaud, thought so highly of our sales team that he posted about us in his weekly article on the site StorefrontBacktalk.  He’s talking about our own Dawn Lampert, Director of Sales, who is one of the best sales people I have ever encountered.  Great job Dawn!

If you are reading this and are a sales professional that reads his post and thinks “that’s me!”, shoot us an email.  We’re hiring but we have a really high bar and only want people who have the “hustle” that Todd describes in their DNA.

While shows & conferences can vary a bit (content, location, reputation) they generally provide a decent barometer of market health as well as good anecdotal feedback. We just returned from FS-TEC (food service technology) in Long Beach. If the last three days is an indicator then I’d say the pulse of the market is ‘measured’. So what does that mean? Well in my view customers, vendors, partners were all cautious but willing to believe things are improving and willing to consider investing. It’s a good balance of understanding that while we (the economy) may not be all the way out of the woods the time may be ripe for consideration and investment to improve our lot.
So what was the direct feedback relevant to MVaaS and Envysion? First, our message on leveraging video to improve both the top and the bottom line resonated incredibly well with customers in this economy. I know, shouldn’t it always? Well we’ve certainly seen times when the marketplace was more than willing to embrace interesting technology for interesting technology’s sake, these are not those times. And that is a great thing for MVaaS & Envysion as we are all about profit improvement. A similar area that resonated particularly well was our willingness to demonstrate ROI (and do the math) for customers through a committed, prescribed pilot process. A second observation (and area of feedback) was that we are spending less time describing what managed video ‘is’ and ‘means’ to the market. And when we do describe it, customers & partners get it quickly. This is very good news as it indicates a growing awareness of the MVaaS model. While our work is certainly not done, we are benefitting both from a growing awareness of our video model as well as a strong SaaS brotherhood of companies like Salesforce.com bringing visibility to the as a service model. Of course this means we can move more quickly to the good stuff…value delivery, how we fit in with other solution components, and when we start!
For those interested in stopping by and seeing a demo, we will be at MURTEC March 10-12. Come by and check out MVaaS in action.

Envysion has developed it’s own reporting development language designed to help make it easier to find exceptions in the vast sea of customer point of sale data.   We’ve been adding capabilities and building reports with it for some time now.

We affectionately call it “Troyport” after the developer who initially created it.

We decided to do this because building exception based reports with standard out of the box tools is pretty hard.  With Troyport, one can focus more on what the exception report needs to do rather than how to code it in a lower level programming language.

Want to know if any particular employee has canceled more than 5 items in 30 minutes and stack rank these occurrences across over all 1,000 of your locations nationwide?  Thanks to Troyport, we can develop, test and deploy that report into production in just days or faster.

It’s amazing how well it works when coupled with our customers who are the real experts in their business to identify fraud and corruption.  Because the turnaround time is so fast, in just a few weeks Envysion can deliver an exception based reporting system that is customized to the customer’s environment.

This customization is necessary to adapt to the types of issues encountered in the customer’s business and  the data systems the customer has available which feed in raw data about what is happening in their business.  So while there are many similarities between customers, when you get down to details, the data is different at every customer out there.

Due to customer demand, Envysion Video  now has support for Firefox and Windows 7 in addition to Internet Explorer 6,7 and 8 on Windows XP and Vista.

We’re currently working on support for Firefox support under Linux as well.

In a recent post I suggested that managed video as a service would see some major customer wins in 2010 that would further validate the appeal and impact of this model.  Clearly I have an inside track on that type of prediction so wasn’t going too far out on a limb as is evidenced by our announcement today of Einstein Noah Restaurant Group’s selection of Envysion for an immediate enterprise rollout to all of their 425 corporate locations.

This is significant for a number of reasons:

First, a leading national restaurant brand decided to invest in our service during the worst economic climate that any of us have ever experienced, one that has hit restaurants and retailers particularly hard.  Without violating any NDAs, I can tell you that they made this decision because they think it will be very good for them financially.  This would not have happened if we were just pitching the traditional video surveillance value proposition with a different architecture and business model – it happened because we were able to demonstrate to them the value that they could bring to their business by utilizing our service.  If it were just a matter of putting in cameras you would see more customers doing just that, regardless of the recent recession.

Second, it is significant as it is another strong endorsement of the impact that businesses can have when they put video in the hands of more than just their security or loss prevention teams.  Einstein’s, like many multi-unit operators, has a very good central LP/Audit team but it is the 100s of people in the rest of the organization that become the force multiplier when armed with the additional insights that we are able to provide.  Many traditional video providers will claim that they CAN be used by other people in the organization – we are demonstrating that 100s and 1000s of other people ARE using the service to drive value, which is a big difference.

Finally, and this is a topic being kicked about on the blogs these days, this win is significant in that it involved absolutely zero contribution from anyone in the traditional video security or systems integrator worlds.  We are an innovative internet startup that is leading the charge in the development of the managed video as a service market – we don’t come from video or security we come from telecom.  We worked directly with a forward thinking customer to understand their requirements and help them implement a service that drives material value for them that happens to use video cameras.  We are managing the entire implementation working with a good partner of ours that does traditional telecom installation services.  Hundreds of recorders and thousands of cameras implemented in a single project and nobody but us and the customer.

Not a bad start to the year I’d say.

A friend, who is out in the Bay Area, and I were talking this past week about product management and it got me thinkinking about product management in a SaaS environment. What stuck out to me as I thought about what’s different (vs. other spaces) was the ability to roll out a new version or completely new product every couple weeks. You can still have major ‘releases’, salesforce does them by the season, but you need to think about development prioritization, productization, pricing, communication really the whole bit on a much more accelerated pace. You also have the benefit (and challenge) of tons of real-time feedback you can get from customers on how they are using what you have out there. In a number of ways it turns the traditional product life-cycle dynamic on its head. It’s quite a balancing act.
My early take-away is that the ‘as a service’ model presents a flexible and fluid environment and that can present a tremendous opportunity for the nimble. Agility in development and responsiveness to customers pays huge dividends. However, it can present some dangerous candy for those not willing to commit and those without focus.  Even with the ability to go in so many directions you still have to pick your spots and follow through for your customers and on your strategy.
It’s a whole new world ripe with some great opportunity but at the core (call me old school) the same business rules apply.

Security Systems News had an insightful editorial on the Integrator of the Future on Friday. Coming from observations on the front line of integrators and customers looking at large scale implementations it points out some challenges for today’s Integrators and looks to how they might change for the better. The points that stood out to me were the need to take a more solution/consulting approach as well as the need to build a relationship with customers that evolves over time. Also called on integrators to be more aware of a customer’s network and be mindful of value (you can’t charge for something when you don’t deliver and prove the value to the customer).

You are probably not surprised to hear an ‘Amen’ from the managed video as a service community on these points. At the core of what we do at Envysion is a focus on our customer’s challenge and a focus on delivering breakthrough value in an ‘easy’ package. Of course we strongly believe a managed video service delivered via the ‘as a service’ model allows us to do more for customers and partners.  We also see it differentiating us from other players.

So will the current set of integrators adjust? Will next generation of solution providers fill the void? What we likely all can agree on is that over time the winner will focus on the customer and value delivery.  Customers get to vote with each new installation.