A benefit of Managed-Video-As-A-Service is that it can scale to a large number of locations. One of the reasons MVaaS scales so well is that it borrows architectural elements from telecommunications network management principles. One of these principles is to collect data and monitor network elements.

Note the graph above. This is a screenshot from one of Envysion’s NOC tools that monitors the collection of point-of-sale data. At Envysion, we know, at any point of time, which DVR locations are correctly receiving point-of-sale data (i.e., working) and which are not. Note the anomoly in the above chart where red and yellow mean “not working” (each x-axis tick represents 6 hours and the y-axis represents number of DVRs).

One might normally be alarmed to see a massive spike in DVRs that haven’t collected point-of-sale data for 12+ hours…until you remember “oh that’s right, its Thanksgiving day” and almost all these stores are closed! Closed store == no transactions to collect.

There will be two more days in the next 31 days with graphs that look similar to the one above — anyone care to guess which days those will be?

Why is collecting this data important? It’s important because with this data we can immediately respond if point-of-sale data collection stops. This data is a critical enabler of our customer’s ROI. They expect it to be present every day and we work very hard to make it so.

Someday, providing telemetry and visualization such as the example above will be as common as CIF resolution in the video industry. It will be normal for a customer to ask a prospective video supplier “what percentage of sites have delivered POS data over the last 30 days?” In the mean time, here at Envysion, we will quietly keep raising the bar.