Fredrik Nilsson of Axis wrote an article at SecurityInfoWatch about how SaaS is taking off in video surveillance.  It’s a good article and highlights some of the reasons that SaaS is gaining momentum, although as you would expect it is definitely told from the IP camera manufacturers perspective.

A key point jumped out for me as I was reading it.

Fredrik states that “instead of maintaining the recording and monitoring station locally, companies can now limit their capital investment to just the cameras and a gateway or router to the hosted storage. The vendor provides the servers that archive the video and manages them for the business”. To me this is one of the broader misconceptions I come across in the market: that SaaS in video surveillance equates to “hosted storage”. SaaS is a method of delivering functionality through software that is hosted in the network. Remote or hosted storage is an architectural decision that one can make depending on the circumstances.

I have talked to people that have declared that they tried to build a SaaS application, but they couldn’t get the service to scale b/c of the bandwidth limitations of streaming all of their customers cameras all of the time (here’s a hint: if you don’t have to stream the video all the time, don’t). I have also seen numerous players in the space touting their software as a service models when they have a hosted storage offering but you still need to load their video management software on your PC or a server in your enterprise in order to access the video.

The Axis article and these anecdotes highlight the fact that while SaaS is gaining momentum in video, many people still don’t understand exactly what it means to provide a SaaS offering. There are some great articles on SaaS at SandHill if you are looking for a bit more of a primer. In the meantime, I’ll take the increased visibility and focus on SaaS video businesses, even if a lot of people don’t yet get what it is.