So one of the big new issues on the SaaS market is, how to integrate cloud to cloud?  Or to cut some of the jargon, how do you integrate your applications you use every day when they are hosted by different companies?

Hosted customer relationship management, hosting billing, hosted POS system, Hosted Video and Hosted Access control seem to make sense.   But there’s not a single provider (nor perhaps should there be) for all these services.

If you want to use them all, and use them together, can you?  The answer is only through writing your own solution and/or hiring someone to write them for you.  And that’s only possible if the hosted system has some way for you to import and export data from the system.  Without that, integration is not really possible.

But not to worry!  While integration between applications can be a daunting task, the cloud really doesn’t make this any more difficult.  In fact, integrating clouds might be easier that a traditional integration of Enterprise deployed systems.  As each service or cloud application integrates, the integration between those services can be shared across all their common customers.

So when it comes to managed video, what is the most valuable or popular service that should be integrated?

In retail, the Point of Sale (POS) system is one of the most important and useful data system for their entire business. Being able to interface this with video is obviously extremely valuable.  But it isn’t exactly easy to get value without a relatively deep integration.

Beware that a lot of vendor’s POS integration is simply a text overlay on top of video. I suppose that counts for something, but that does not make the POS data searchable or reportable. Without being searchable and reportable, the resulting “deluge” of data makes POS integration not very useful

Another difficulty is that the POS market is very fragmented. Radiant and Micros seems to be among the dominant vendors in quick service retail, but collectively still only hold a small percentage of the market for quick service retail. Other retail segments use entirely different POS vendors. Even within a particular POS vendor, there are often several versions of their products, including simply different versions of code that change the data they output.

Further, each customer often will customize their implementation of their POS in ways that require at least some customization if you want to do reporting. With rich capabilities in one’s video system to interface with POS, adapting to these customizations is not a major ordeal.

In addition, there are a few technical details like

1. time synchronization between the POS system and the Video system,

2. updates to IP addresses, firewalls, network routing and so on between the video and POS systems

3. software upgrades on the POS system and the video system and maintaining compatibility.

4. Security rules, concerns and issues

5. Interdepartmental issues related to resolving and keeping resolved all the above when there is a separate network provider, video provider, POS provider and IT deparment.
Once you’ve integrated however, there are big benefits to the customer.  Is all that work worth a 10-20% increase in profitability?  You bet it is.

With a good software framework, integration is quite a bit easier. It’s taken Envysion 4 years to get where we are with POS integration.  We have that framework and are continually building upon it.

A few more issues are looked at over at John Honovich’s blog.    The Retail Solutions online magazine ponders that even more integration is valuable or is perhaps wasting video intelligence?  Integration is hard, but when you have the right data and reports, it’s extremely valuable.

Envysion video does.

Sure we have online help, tips and tricks and that sort of thing.  But with a click on the web, you can get a technician dispatched to any of your locations and have a camera moved, cleaned or refocused.  Your contact details, the location you’re working with and other information is automatically filled out for you.

We affectionately call it “Troyport” after the developer who initially created it.

We decided to do this because building exception based reports with standard out of the box tools is pretty hard.  With Troyport, one can focus more on what the exception report needs to do rather than how to code it in a lower level programming language.

Want to know if any particular employee has canceled more than 5 items in 30 minutes and stack rank these occurrences across over all 1,000 of your locations nationwide?  Thanks to Troyport, we can develop, test and deploy that report into production in just days or faster.

It’s amazing how well it works when coupled with our customers who are the real experts in their business to identify fraud and corruption.  Because the turnaround time is so fast, in just a few weeks Envysion can deliver an exception based reporting system that is customized to the customer’s environment.

This customization is necessary to adapt to the types of issues encountered in the customer’s business and  the data systems the customer has available which feed in raw data about what is happening in their business.  So while there are many similarities between customers, when you get down to details, the data is different at every customer out there.

We’re currently working on support for Firefox support under Linux as well.

To quote the IBM archive of their employee publication “Think” from 1972:

About 1905, the U.S. Census Bureau gave him an ultimatum: improve the machines and cut the rentals (which each year about equaled his total manufacturing cost). To this Hollerith said, No. The Census Bureau said: Then we’ll make them ourselves and improve them ourselves. Which they did, using former Hollerith employees to run the operation.

A simple age old truth, you’ve got to listen to your customers.  The pace of change and the competition in today’s business makes this ever more important.  But technology still needed to be evolved to meet customers needs back in 1905.

In 1896 Herman Hollerith formed the Tabulating Machine Company (TMC).  He invented a machine to tabulate the 1890 census.  But instead of selling the machine to be used by the US government, he leased it.  The system was owned and operated by TMC and produced the results for the 1890 census in only 1 year the 1880 census took 8 years to tabulate)

In 1911, TMC and 3 other corporations merged to become IBM.

The book is an interesting read so far (just started it) and raises several social and legal questions about the Internet, free access to the Internet and regulation.

As part of some development we’ve done to implement the Envysion EnVR software on low power embedded type systems coupled with IP cameras I wondered what the cost savings in power might be versus more power hungry PC based platforms.  So I compared the embedded platform to a configuring using our standard video recorder system which runs on PC based hardware and utilizes software compression with analog capture and analog cameras.

Doing this we’ve found the embedded system running the same EnVR software reduces power consumption by about 70% on up to 8 camera systems.  However, power still really isn’t currently all that expensive at a US national average somewhere around $0.11 per kilowatt hour.  So even with this big power reduction it didn’t make sense to go beyond 8 cameras due to the increased cost of the IP cameras versus analog cameras.

Even at 6-8 cameras, the cost savings in power consumption takes  3+ years to payback versus the lower cost analog cameras.  With more than 8 cameras, it quickly takes some much longer to achieve any cost savings that the time exceeds a reasonable life expectancy of the video recorder system (Assuming a range of 3-5 years for the hard drive and cooling fans in the recording system).

The CCD also powers a lot of surveillance cameras and was invented in 1969.  They were working on a video phone.  My my, how time files and still no video phones! 

Today’s 40th anniversary NASA will broadcast the best available footage from some recordings engineers made of the video received on the ground as opposed to the original tapes from the moon.  These are reported the highest quality images published in 40 years since the lunar mission.  Some original tapes from the lunar cameras of the Apollo 11 moonwalk appear to be lost.

The lunar camera used Slow-scan television (SSTV) and when re-broadcast for TV, it was converted which resulted in a big loss in image quality.  According to Wikipedia, early Apollo 11 video was at 10 frames per second and 320 lines of resolution.  Not so different from the typical low-end CCTV system today.