In this final post on the various paths a customer can follow to take advantage of video, I will provide the rationale customers use when they subscribe to video from an MVaaS provider.  Here are some cases that describe companies that are choosing to Subscribe.

You are results, not technology focused.  The most common thread amongst MVaaS customers is that they are focused primarily on the business benefits of video, and are not viewing video either as a strict security application or just another hardware purchase.  Instead, these customers have identified a problem that they think they can solve by using video.  They are looking to address that problem as quickly and easily as they can, without the burden of a complex installation or significant on-going management requirements.  They don’t care about the technology itself (don’t try to pitch them on speeds and feeds) they only care about whether they can easily and broadly use video to accomplish their objectives.

You are capital constrained.  One of the financial benefits of MVaaS is that you pay for the service over time as you use it.  Many of the customers that would benefit from video are unable to afford a multi thousand dollar upfront capital investment in a good video system.  They are, however, able to afford a couple hundred dollars a month for the same capabilities.   On a side note that I’ll address later, there is a huge difference between a Subscription and a lease, although both of these address the capital constraint issue.

You want to keep up with the latest technology.  By subscribing to a service, rather than purchasing a specific generation of hardware/software, customers are able to benefit from improvements in technology without having to do a forklift upgrade or even having to manage the version control and software upgrade process.  Many customers have IT organizations that are very efficiently staffed (how’s that for a euphamism?) and don’t have the resources to manage yet another system wide deployment – subscribing eliminates much of the IT requirement while still providing the value of the service to the end users.

More and more customers are beginning to realize the benefits of Managed Video as a Service.  Our job as an MVaaS industry is to make this list of cases a lot longer and to ensure that they apply to the broadest set of customers.