I’m going to start a recurring weekly post to give people a sense for the nature and scope of activity that MVaaS providers are seeing.  I will keep it simple and high level, but will also try to give you explicit examples of the conversations that are happening.

MVaaS customer conversations

We hit several very positive customer milestones this past week.  The customers were primarily in the restaurant and retail spaces – these are two segments that have clearly embraced the advantages of MVaaS.  The customers ranged from QSR to casual dining on the restaurant side (I’ll do a separate post on the difference in the value proposition between these two restaurant sub-segments).  The most significant milestone on the retail side was through a channel partner and was with a retail operator that has 5,000+ locations, all of which are corporate owned (the difference between corporate and franchise owned is another topic of a future post)

The milestones themselves were all related to trials we are in or about to start with our prospects.  As MVaaS becomes a more enterprise level solution, customers are electing to put their prospective vendors and their internal organizations through pilot projects to ensure that they have tested the solution and are confident that they will receive an appropriate ROI.  Upon successful pilot, they can then roll the solution out into their locations.  Here is a sample of our progress:  We successfully completed our pilot with a large multi-brand franchisee with 100+ locations and will be installing all of the remaining locations this quarter.  We got the go ahead to begin the pilot for a national QSR brand with 600+ corporate owned locations and installed our first store in a pilot with another national brand with 500+ locations.  We also got to contract with a smaller, but well known casual dining restaurant.

MVaaS Partner Conversations

As active as we were with customers this past week, we were even more active in potential channel partner conversations.  Rather than spend a lot of time talking about all of the individual conversations, I’ll provide some context on our overall strategy and the type of partners we are speaking to.

One of the key principles of MVaaS is that it is an excellent managed services opportunity.  We believe strongly that there are several potential channel segments that are both interested and capable of selling MVaaS to their existing customer bases.  This past week was an excellent example of the breadth of the potential partners we are speaking to.  On Monday we spoke to a large telecom provider that you will definitely recognize, but that you may not have ever thought of with respect to MVaaS.  We had a joint customer call with one of our more promising near-term partners, a provider of remote guard services that is looking to expand their value proposition.  We had another conversation, discussing joint customer opportunities with the sales team of a leading managed services provider.  Our technical team met with two potential partners, one is a household name in the networking equipment space (we are looking to integrate with their products to form a combined service offering) and the other is a hosted access control company that is evaluating adding video to its service.

All in all a pretty busy week!