As I mentioned last Saturday in a post, I spent the first part of this week in Atlanta at ASIS – one of the two really large security shows each year, the other being the ISC shows (there are two of them, East and West).  The thing that I like about the ASIS conference is that it tends to have a lot more end users there whereas ISC tends to be a show more attended by integrators than real end customers.

I’ll give a full account of my trip in tomorrow’s post, but I thought I’d give a quick example of another MVaaS differentiator that was highlighted in one of my conversations with a customer prospect of ours.  The customer has ~1,500 locations, all corporate owned and managed.  The nature of their business (they are in retail) is that they do only a handful of transactions in a day (average is 10-15 per store per day).  I was talking to one of their regional directors of loss prevention about their biggest pain points and discovered that the single most important issue that this person was dealing with was false contracts.  The problem that they had was that some portion of the 15 transactions per day were complete fiction, either done by an employee or someone with familiarity with how this company does business.  The challenge that the LP director faced was that they were not usually able to identify these suspected false transactions until several months after the event occurred.  At that point there was almost no chance that they could use video to help them in any way in the investigation as they only keep 30-45 days of video on their traditional DVRs.

Here’s where an MVaaS solution can help in ways that a traditional DVR solution can’t.  Given the hosted nature of an MVaaS solution, customers can save their video not just to a file on their laptop, but they can also save video into a secure data center where it will persist as long as they want it to.  It can be more easily shared with lots of people; it can be categorized, annotated and tracked in a case management context; and it can be archived for future investigative purposes.  All of this can be done without any need for the company’s IT group to do anything – no need to set up and manage central storage capabilities, no need to touch any individual DVR, no need to worry about file management or anything related to the hundreds or thousands of video clips that a company may be interested in centrally archiving and sharing over the course of the year.

In the case of this customer, the application of this capability is pretty straight-forward.  Customer only has 15 transactions a day, which is really not that many in the retail world.  They can set up a rule once that is immediately applied to all of their 1,500 locations where the 5 minutes associated with every single transaction is automatically stored off of their in-store recorders and into the network.  With that simple step they have just enabled their company to investigate any single transaction that occurs in their business as far back as they would like and they never even had to mention the project to IT.  If they decided they didn’t need every single transaction (if instead of 15 transactions, you had 1500 you might want to be a little more precise in your criteria for archiving) they could simply change the archiving rule and narrow down the amount of transactions that get stored centrally.

Saving video off-premise is definitely something that can be done by traditional video systems, but even those that are more enterprise software platforms (not SaaS and definitely not MVaaS) require a large amount of IT involvement to pull off what I described above.  From the customers standpoint (both user and IT) everything I described above can be set up and implemented by a single user sitting in a Starbucks sipping a latte.  Pretty cool stuff.