While shows & conferences can vary a bit (content, location, reputation) they generally provide a decent barometer of market health as well as good anecdotal feedback. We just returned from FS-TEC (food service technology) in Long Beach. If the last three days is an indicator then I’d say the pulse of the market is ‘measured’. So what does that mean? Well in my view customers, vendors, partners were all cautious but willing to believe things are improving and willing to consider investing. It’s a good balance of understanding that while we (the economy) may not be all the way out of the woods the time may be ripe for consideration and investment to improve our lot.
So what was the direct feedback relevant to MVaaS and Envysion? First, our message on leveraging video to improve both the top and the bottom line resonated incredibly well with customers in this economy. I know, shouldn’t it always? Well we’ve certainly seen times when the marketplace was more than willing to embrace interesting technology for interesting technology’s sake, these are not those times. And that is a great thing for MVaaS & Envysion as we are all about profit improvement. A similar area that resonated particularly well was our willingness to demonstrate ROI (and do the math) for customers through a committed, prescribed pilot process. A second observation (and area of feedback) was that we are spending less time describing what managed video ‘is’ and ‘means’ to the market. And when we do describe it, customers & partners get it quickly. This is very good news as it indicates a growing awareness of the MVaaS model. While our work is certainly not done, we are benefitting both from a growing awareness of our video model as well as a strong SaaS brotherhood of companies like Salesforce.com bringing visibility to the as a service model. Of course this means we can move more quickly to the good stuff…value delivery, how we fit in with other solution components, and when we start!
For those interested in stopping by and seeing a demo, we will be at MURTEC March 10-12. Come by and check out MVaaS in action.