Fall is my favorite time of year; the leaves are changing, it’s cooling down and most importantly it’s football season.  For the past few years I’ve anticipated the start of the season with much more enthusiasm.  The reason for this new found enthusiasm has been my involvement in a fantasy football league.  Fantasy football, takes something that I already have a passion for and makes it even more exciting by giving me a reason to be involved in several games in order to track my team’s performance.  It also gives me the opportunity to put on my GM hat and make decisions that can help or hinder my team’s performance. 

Effectively managing a team requires time, effort and an understanding of information (e.g. trades, injuries, trends) that is crucial to a successful season.   A GM has a lot of information to dissect each week in order to give their team the best chance to win.   The first couple of seasons I found it difficult to keep up with all of the trades, added/dropped players, injuries and the progress of free agents, which one can add to their team if someone on their team has a bye week or isn’t performing.  Finally, I activated a feature on the Fantasy Football web site that I had never used before, “Alerts”.  The second that I enabled this setting I became a much better GM and could make decisions that would affect the outcome of the game days in advance.  The alerting function of this website takes information that is being gathered about each NFL player and proactively alerts (sends and email) each GM based upon criteria they have designated as important.  A GM can be alerted to set their line up, player updates, league trades, and scores.  This information can be vital to the planning of your starting lineup each week and if acted upon can give your team a competitive advantage.

MVaaS acts in much the same way as the Fantasy Football website.  Through the integration of software based business applications e.g. POS systems, access control, temperature sensors etc. an owner or manager can set up reports with specific business rules, that if broken, can generate an alert that proactively prompts a user to log in and review video from a specific location.  For example if I have an MVaaS solution integrated with my POS system I can define a rule that if a site has more than ten voids in a day I want to be alerted.  This type of capability can come in very handy when making tough decision about your Fantasy Football team, and more importantly your business.  I find it to be a great asset to be able to make decisions based upon up to date information.