I had the opportunity to attend the Managed and Hosted Video Summit last week. The summit was a very unique event in that it was not a tradeshow, but a way for the companies in this space to have a dialogue and figure out how to advance the industry as a whole so that everyone benefits. I’m a full time MBA student at the University of Colorado, and have been doing an internship this summer at Envysion in Product and Marketing. Prior to my internship, I had no experience with video surveillance or SaaS. This is an exciting industry to be working in because it is so new, and it is unclear what it is going to look like in the future. This industry is interesting because it has so many unsolved problems, and there are numerous opportunities to make a meaningful impact. Attending the summit was a great experience which gave me a better understanding of state of the industry and the challenges it faces.
The first thing that stood out to me is the sheer size of the video market, currently about $7.3 billion. Managed and hosted video currently makes up a very small slice of this market, although it has been growing rapidly. Many of the technologies involved with managed video are only about 5 years old, and the SaaS/cloud computing approach to software is just now being understood by many customers. The SaaS approach makes it much easier to expand the use of video beyond a handful of security or loss prevention personnel, to anyone in an organization. By viewing video through a web browser, people in security, management, finance, marketing or HR can view video from anywhere. This is a radical shift in the use of video that many potential customers may not realize is possible yet.
One of the themes that came through at the summit is that counter balancing the tremendous opportunity in managed video, there are challenges. Among them is the use of different terminology by different companies. Customers may not understand the differences between Saas, MVaaS, hosted video, or cloud computing. The participants seemed to agree that it would be helpful for everyone would be to come up with some standard terminology.
Another hurdle to gaining wider adoption that was discussed is the need to produce verifiable ROI’s for customers. Everyone is facing economic challenges right now. And any capital outlay is going to face severe scrutiny. This challenge can be compounded by the fact that when video used by more people in an organization, the people who make the decision on whether or not to deploy a system also change. In addition to selling to someone in loss prevention, there may be several other people that need to sign off, particularly in the IT department. This calls for a different sales approach than is used by legacy providers. I know Envysion has developed detailed ROI’s for its customers and it would seem others would benefit from focusing here.
Overall the summit was a great learning experience. I was able to get a much better understanding of the opportunities and challenges facing the managed video industry. This is certainly an area that will provide lots of interesting problems to solve and opportunities for career growth well into the future.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive on the content, mix of attendees, and dialogue driven by the sold out event.   The energy and excitement throughout the summit and the social events was evident and invigorating for everyone.   Now it is on all of us to maintain and seize the momentum that was created. 

So what’s next?  Given unanimous support for a recurring Summit, we’ll take feedback and circle back on dates for the next Summit.   And in addition to this blog we will also build some other vehicles for all of us to continue to build the managed and hosted video community.

More to come shortly…

The objective of the summit is to accelerate segment growth and speed adoption of MVaaS and Hosted video solutions. The agenda is geared toward business development and generating a productive dialogue that will inform how to best attack the opportunity. And of course Boulder is a great place to escape the summer heat and humidity hitting most of the country.

Find registration information here or give us a call if you have questions.

Call me crazy but it would seem that a great opportunity to innovate and perhaps de-risk some of the margin challenges presented by growing dollar menus is Managed Video. Managed Video as a Service targets operations and profit improvement and provides a rapid payback with no strain on IT and little to no overhead. We’ve delivered with a large (and growing) set of customers and can provide historical proof and pilot demonstration for new customers of 10-15% profit improvement.  Matter of fact just today we ran the numbers for a customer who is adopting our solution and predictably the results came in at 10%+ profit improvement. While I’d argue 10% profit improvement and under six month payback is always a good answer it seems to be even better when combined with the current dollar menu craze.  A one, two punch of innovation to drive revenue and sustain margin.

You had me at hello!

One of the more interesting themes in my discussions (though I’m sure there was some selection bias in my sample) was the need for solution providers to be able to play and engage other functional areas of the retail enterprise customer to drive differentiated results. In discussion and demos that I saw, typically solution providers were pairing up Loss prevention with Security (theft deterrence and investigations as examples) or pairing Loss Prevention with Marketing (e.g. mystery shoppers and video based analytics companies). But overall it was a recurring theme and was even mentioned in my discussion with the trade press. 

While cross-functional value seems intuitive and isn’t a complete shocker of an observation, it was a Loss Prevention specific show so I thought it was interesting. It also resonated with me given that a key piece of the MVaaS value proposition is to provide easily accessible video insight to the masses (across functions). Loss prevention is definitely a key value area and application for MVaaS and we pair with marketing, security, human resources like many of the solutions I saw and discussed.  However, the two differences for MVaaS from what I heard was that no one was talking about reaching out to all of those areas and no one was talking about pairing Loss Prevention with operations. Analogous to Human Resources, if you can get every store operator and retail field employee thinking about loss prevention you are going to be more successful than if it’s a small team focused on LP (10’s of people vs. potentially 1000’s). Empower the masses with something that is easy to use and you can become part of the culture/DNA and drive exponential results.

And for the record, my 6+ years in Colorado have officially killed my ability to deal with Atlanta heat.  Amen to 11% humidity and 82 sunny degrees!

I think all 5 are spot on but I wanted to expand a bit on #3 – Know How You Will Measure Success. For readers of this blog, and those of you familiar with Envysion, you know that we are laser focused on delivering bottom line profit improvement for our customers. Because of that focus we are actively involved both in defining metrics but also the measuring.

For this to resonate and be valuable for customers its critical that the metrics and the measurement be in terms familiar and selected by the customers. Specifically, what are their KPI’s? What matters to them? How do they calculate it? Once value and success metrics are defined with the customer the next question is how do you measure it. Here again it is critical to align with the customer on the data, method, periods etc. At Envysion we typically conduct a pilot with our customers at the beginning of which we align on success metrics and at the end we run the numbers together with the customers finance team. While we are happy to do the math and run the numbers on behalf of our customers we make sure that they completely buy in up front and the results at the end.

The net here is that not only do you need to measure success for customers – in our view you should also align with your customer on what those metrics are and how you calculate them.

#1 on the list of to-do’s is to ensure that the video provider offers text overlay. I’d suggest that what you really want is effective time synchronization and ability to see full receipts next to & together with the appropriate video. I’m actually not a huge fan of obstructing the video and picture with transactional data. What you want is effective synchronization and visibility. An additional challenge is that overlay with some providers is an indicator that the really don’t have the data – meaning the customer can’t leverage/manipulate data (more on value of this shortly) and/or that the camera-overlay text is hard coded so you can’t view the video with out it and you can’t switch to different camera angles with the same data viewed. Probably easy to see the challenges here.

#2 on the list is to ensure you get ‘abnormal event alerting’. I completely agree that you need exception alerting but what about reporting as well? Customers benefit tremendously from being able to do ad hoc and pre-determined reporting across POS data and then pulling up video from any of the transactions that make up those reports. It can provide the ‘second layer of the onion’ that goes beyond a warning signal and validates if there is really a problem.

In the close the author also suggest that customers ‘work with an experienced integrator who can ensure your system is properly functioning, provide technical support and can remotely monitor the system to ensure it is fully functional.’ So buy in other words buy a hardware solution and then pay a 3rd party to watch after it…as you might guess I’d suggest the logical alternative is to get a managed video provider who does both. A good managed video service provider will not only perform the integration but also will monitor your solution to make sure its working and train you to ensure it delivers the value you need.

Lastly, a customer should consider not only POS system integration but selecting a video platform that will integrate to other business systems. How about Access Control? Or Alarming? Intrusion Detection? Similar value from video integration can be realized in these areas.

All that said, I agree that the moral of the story here is that integration is just step 1. To unlock the value there some additional components a customer needs…and managed video as a service seems to fit the bill well.

To celebrate our respective moves into new headquarters Envysion and Zayo are hosting an open house on Thursday, May 20 from 3:30 – 6:30pm.

We’ll have demo’s of the Envysion application, tours of our new facility and we’ll even have Louisville’s Mayor Sisk on hand for a ribbon cutting at 4:30.

There will be refreshments and hors d’œuvres served. Your family is welcome.

So if you happen to be in Colorado on Thursday the 20th, swing by. Hopefully we’ll see you there

I’m sure most would agree that it’s a unique and exiting opportunity to help establish and shape a new segment, and that’s what this summit is all about. The objective of the summit is to bring managed and hosted video players, ecosystem participants, thought leaders, and investors together for a forum where we can learn, shape our space, and drive the success of the segment.

Please check out the agenda & additional information. I think you can see it’s a great line up over a couple days. And spending a little time in Boulder during the summer isn’t so bad either. Give any of us a call if you’d like to participate or have questions. Hopefully we’ll see you there!

Because many of today’s SaaS solutions blur the line between a software solution and a business service, a widening array of institutions are now exploring whether they can add SaaS solutions and cloud computing services to their corporate portfolios to better serve their customers and gain a greater competitive advantage.

The article provides Bank of America as its key example. And suggests it’s a ‘win-win’.

BofA recognizes that it needs to offer its customers a broader set of services to better fulfill their needs…Selling SaaS and cloud computing services through an established institution like BofA gives these solutions a new level of credibility in the marketplace.

BofA in this example is aggregating a collection of services that are fairly unrelated but meaningful to thier target customer and providing some degree of ‘trusted advisor’ in reselling cloud services.  So what about for reselling managed and hosted video services? Who’s got next?
While it would be fun to throw names out there, for now I’ll focus on describing a couple potential options. The first is likely pretty obvious, an aggregator of one flavor or another likely functional (everything IT: managed video, network, software etc) or segment oriented (everything retail: real estate, managed video, facilities). The second type of reseller that may emerge is a value added reseller that connects the clouds together in a meaningful way. This ‘cloud connector’ would do things like seamlessly integrate a customers CRM data to their ERP data.  I see this cloud connector as much like the successful system integrator of the past twenty years.  They will resell sets of cloud services that work on their own but also interdependently as a system for customers. 
I’ve got a strong bias that a successful reseller needs to add value so my money is on the cloud connector. I’d be interested in hearing from folks out there some already out there. Our Chief Architect (a.k.a. Jeff Gordon) and I couldn’t come up with a good one.