This has been an interesting last two weeks in both the broader financial markets and in our market for video solutions.

I’ve already written about my views on the near to medium term impact on the MVaaS space – I’ve hypothesized that MVaaS providers will do differentially well during tough economic conditions given the strong ROI and the fact that a managed service is easier to implement than an enterprise/IT intensive solution.

Given my lengthy consulting background, I am always looking at data to validate or refute my hypotheses.  Here are a couple of the meetings that I’ve had over the past few weeks and how they’ve influenced my thinking.

Large national retailer #1 has close to 1,000 stores.  They are actively evaluating video and have narrowed it down to two providers.  They were hoping to have already rolled out video to a large number of their stores this year.  They aren’t doing that well financially and their investors have them freezing capex for the time being.  Project will be delayed a couple of quarters.

Large national retailer #2 has close to 4,000 stores.  They have video today, but can’t use it very well and only use it in the store and only for security incident investigation.  They are in very low margin business and see opportunity to drive profitability with MVaaS solution without requiring a tremendous amount of upfront capital.  They are also on a limited IT budget so this is leading them to favor managed solutions.  Interested in 30-50 store pilot in 1Q.

Large national restaurant chain #1 with ~2,500 locations.  Customer is in lower end of restaurant segment from a demographic standpoint, so recession actually helps them as customers trade down.  Had plans for upgrading video solutions next year and definitely interested in anything that can show demonstrable ROI impact in 1Q.  Interested in pilot to prove ROI.

Large national restaurant #2 with 2,500 locations.  Interested in solution, but need IT blessing to spin up as a project.  IT budget being cut so most new projects deferred until 2010.  We have some work to do to educate them on how minimal IT involvement would need to be, but this one will be uphill battle for forseeable future.

Four customer conversations, four different situations.  I’ve had a number of others in this span as well and it only reinforces my hypothesis.  The market may be challenging, and some customers may just not be buyers for a while, but for those that are, MVaaS will be a compelling option for them to consider.