I had an interesting conversation with a potential customer today that reinforced one of the key advantages of MVaaS over traditional video services and made me think of it in a slightly different way. One of the topics we touched on was how easy it is with MVaaS to centrally control who has access to what video from what location.
I tend to give the same example to illustrate my point on this topic. If a company is really going to take advantage of the value proposition that we and many other video providers espouse (that video can be used beyond security to drive tremendous ROI for operations, marketing, etc.), then that company has to give access to video to a wider audience within the company. This means someone (IT or LP) has to manage the access rights for a bunch of people in the company. At even modest scale this can be daunting. Take a company with 500 locations. They likely have 500+ people in the organization that should have access to video (one store manager per store at minimum) Call it 600+ people when you count the corporate group and the regional managers etc. Who is going to manage the access rights of 600+ people who all have access to a different set of stores? And don’t forget that store managers come and go and move around and companies realign regions and hire and fire all the time, so this isn’t a one time thing. This is incredibly challenging without a centralized admin capability. MVaaS not only handles this easily for the customer, it can do it automatically for them by just linking to their own organizational databases.
I’ve talked about this before, and while this definitely resonated with the customer, it wasn’t the key takeaway for me. The key was the combination of the advantage above with another advantage that I’ve discussed that I had never really put together as part of the access challenge. The other advantage stems from the SaaS model where a customer doesn’t have to worry about version control and software downloads.
Here’s the scenario: my prospective customer has 2,500 sites that have DVRs from two different DVR manufacturers and they have been putting in DVRs from those two companies for years. This means that they likely have 3-4 different models of each DVR from buying them over time. The company says it has some ability to access video remotely today, but that only a handful of people can do it. When pressed why, they replied that it is too big a hassle to get someone set up on video b/c they have to figure out which of 5-6 client software versions they would have to load on someone’s computer to be able to access a particular site. In many cases an LP person would have to have 3 or 4 different client software versions loaded on various computers to access all of the sites that they need to see. I say various computers b/c many versions of remote access client software can only have one version installed on a computer at a time.
Combine the challenge of managing 600+ people’s access to 500 different recorders with the complexity of figuring out and managing the distribution of 4-5 five different client applications at any time. The prospect today has this challenge with 5X as many sites, which is an exponentially harder problem. This is why there are only a few people at the customer who can access video – its just not practical to try to give it out broadly.
We are currently providing service to a customer with 800 people having different levels of access to 700 sites and the customer has to do… nothing.
