My last two posts MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video Compared and Managed Video as a Service Explained introduced the difference between MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video as well as the common benefits they both provide. Today, I’ll begin a 5 part series that discusses some of the differences.
Total cost of ownership is a well known analysis method to determine the overall cost of purchasing a system. Let’s consider how this applies to MVaaS versus Enterprise Hosted Video. For the sake of this discussion, I’ll assume that the cost of purchasing and installing camera equipment, as well as the cost of the DVR hardware/software is identical for both models. The focus of this post will be on the cost of the server-side application that manages all the remote DVRs.
To begin with, let’s assume you are going to implement the software as a hosted service within the Enterprise. Below is a list of costs you are going to incur:
- Cost of the hardware server to run the application
- Server license costs (application license, operating system, database)
- To maintain some level of high availability for the software, you need to double the costs above for a warm standby server in the event the primary server fails. (If you choose not spend this cost, then your enterprise hosted service will be at greater risk of being unavailable.)
- A percentage of IT staff expense for configuration, installation, and network setup of above hardware and software. (The network configuration will be non-trivial; a later post will explain this further).
- Annual software maintenance and support fees. Annual hardware maintenance support fees.
- Ongoing operational expense (datacenter expense for electrical power and cooling).
- Ongoing IT staff expense for server management.
Whereas an MVaaS model has
- Monthly subscription fee
- A percentage of IT staff expense for consultation to insure users have unfettered access to the MVaaS server web site (much less than above, due to the fact IT need only allow HTTP port 80 access to a web site, which they undoubtedly already do for other sites).
Clearly, if the monthly MVaaS subscription fee is reasonable, then MVaaS has a lower total cost of ownership than comparative enterprise hosted software.
(Authors note: if anyone would like to provide me with appropriate pricing for an Enterprise hosted server software license fee and general sizing of the hardware needed, I would be delighted to build a detailed spreadsheet view of above comparing to Envysion Video).
