My last post about a week ago was about how I felt like I finally have a strong enough grasp of where Envysion fits in the broader world of video/security that congregates at ISC West, making the conference seem smaller and more manageable to me than it ever has in the past.  In that post, I promised to follow up with the key differentiator about our service that really hit home with me while I was there.

I spend my time at ISC West (and ASIS as well) doing two primary things: talking to customers/partners and checking out other players in the space.  I did the usual rounds this year and checked out everyone from the traditional PC based DVR manufacturers to the IP camera VMS software guys.  I saw a lot of really interesting solutions and some very advanced capabilities.  One IP VMS company in particular had a really cool demo.  Part of the appeal of the demo was the crazy touch screen projector that they were using for the demo – I hadn’t seen one before but it makes for one really impressive demo (sorry for the tangent there – I clearly had gadget envy)  Aside from the impressive projector, the demo showed how the software could easily manage 100s of cameras and let you create video walls and move doznes of camera views around and do 20 other things with lots of cameras simultaneously that were all very advanced.

A year or two ago this would have concerned me, seeing a bunch of advanced features that we don’t even have on our roadmap.  This year it didn’t phase me a bit.  Why not?  Because it has become increasingly clear to me that we are solving a very different problem for a very different end user/customer than almost every single provider I saw at ISC West.  The majority, if not all, of the video providers at ISC West are making their video solutions better and more powerful for the same small group within the business that utilize video today.  They are targeting the handful of people that are in loss prevention, security, or risk management.  They are adding capabilities to differentiate themselves and add value for this core group of people, hence all the really advanced features.  Our model is the exact opposite.  While our solution is valuable for this same group, our focus is on making video simple and powerful enough that the rest of the company, in addition to LP and security, can use it and derive value from it.  Two very different strategies with very different implications.

If all you care about is the security or LP group you get to deal with power users and don’t have to worry about the scalability of the service or having to manage software on lots of people’s computers.  You can innovate by adding bells and whistles that add incremental value to your existing users.  If, however, you care about the rest of the company, you get to deal with a range of technical abilities (including the very technically illiterate) and you have to worry about an entirely different scale/network challenge and a much higher bar from an expected availability standpoint.

You can argue the merits of both strategies, but there aren’t very many if any other players out there going down our path yet.  This is great for us as we continue to build this category and separate ourselves from the traditional video players.  At some point soon, however, I’d expect some more folks to start to think about the simple question “If you think you get an ROI on your video investment when 10 people in your company can use video, how much of an impact do you think you can have on your business when 1000 people are benefiting?”