Infoworld had an article this past week titled Why businesses still hate enterprise software. The article lists out a bunch of pain points but #1 & #2 on the list were the high cost of ownership and difficult upgrades. The strain a solution places on customer is often overlooked part of selection/decision math (see our ROI blog) but even if it is overlooked on the front end examination it’s a very real cost that customers will incur and as you can read in the article, they are increasingly pissed off about it.

Certainly there is some great software out there that was and will be delivered via the traditional client-server model. And at the end of the day customers should care about the net value a solution delivers (we’d actually look forward to helping customers with this examination). That said it is refreshing to see broader acknowledgement of the support costs that can come along for the ride. Additional costs beyond what you pay upfront can be rich and may include installation, configuration, maintenance, upgrades, change management, help desk, trouble shooting etc. Opportunity cost, another often overlooked area, also can penalize customers as they tie up resources and scarce mind-share that could have been devoted elsewhere with better returns.

Software as a service and Envysion’s managed video as a service specifically seek to address this challenge head on. We aim to put no strain on a customers IT group or network. Customers only need a browser to access our software and services they never install anything on any client computer or server. Envysion upgrades (which occur every few weeks) are delivered seamlessly and never require customers to lift a finger. Our application is built for every day use and the every day user so help desks and heavy training requirements are a thing of the past. Should a problem arise we have a fully staffed NOC.  Actually we proactively go after problems as we monitor and manage the service and fix issues as we find them.

For those out there frustrated with complex video software and/or want a solution that delivers more while straining you less – give us a call, we’d love to talk to you.

Envysion has developed it’s own reporting development language designed to help make it easier to find exceptions in the vast sea of customer point of sale data.   We’ve been adding capabilities and building reports with it for some time now.

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.

Due to customer demand, Envysion Video  now has support for Firefox and Windows 7 in addition to Internet Explorer 6,7 and 8 on Windows XP and Vista.

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

Business data (meta-data) needs to be constantly scanned and reported onto to maximize it’s value.   It’s important that there are many ways to scan, slice and dice this data because each business is different and the information sought also frequently changes.

Storing video and business intelligence separately allows Envysion to have more flexibility as well as reliably scale to larger and at lower cost that systems which store business data embedded into the same database as video.  Storing business or “meta” data in it’s own, separate database really helps give one a lot of flexibility to run all kinds of analysis using regular database and analysis tools as opposed to specialized tools that have to deal with a proprietary video database format.  In addition, the meta data is much, much smaller than video data, so the business information database is much less costly to scale up to support a lot of data.

Salient Systems makes a good argument that video management systems should store video and meta data separately for reliability’s sake in their whitepaper on Modular vs. Dependant Design.

If there’s one thing I need in the office, it’s headphones. Headphones piping music straight to my cerebral cortex. One reason is because it can get pretty noisy and when you’re heads down on a problem, trying to tune out a conversation can get distracting. Having said that, I wear headphones even when I’m working from home and it’s dead quiet.. so perhaps that’s just what I tell my boss and I’m really just a slacker.

Sometime in 2008, I discovered a music service that you may already know about called Pandora. It’s a free service and they have a really nice iPhone client, which is key. The beauty of Pandora is that based on your preferences the system plays music it thinks you’ll enjoy.. and it’s a beautiful thing. I’ve been turned on to a ton of new music using the service. To me, it’s magic.  Some people have speculated that somewhere down the road this kind of application know-how will lead to this:

Image via Wikipedia.

Or this:

Image via Wikipedia.

Personally, I think it’ll be more like this:

Image via Wikipedia.

We know it’s not all magic, that there are humans categorizing and tagging Artists/Albums/Songs all day long, that there’s metadata ‘the system’ uses to make recommendations.

Having ‘the system’ make recomendations to you based preferences is something that makes a lot of sense. Using MVaaS and getting a point of sale feed is a great way to do it because it doesn’t involve humans tagging files. You’ve got your POS terminals feeding ‘the system’ metadata about your video.  This is all you need to get started alerting your organization to things you might like to know about.

If you’re a retail operator selling a new widget wouldn’t it be cool to know when you’ve sold X number of widgets? Even better, wouldn’t it be cool to see the video so you know who’s buying what?  On the other end of the spectrum, perhaps you’d also like to be notified when a store executes a particular number of transaction voids.. oh, and here’s the video..  and hey, it’s the same guy and there’s some slight of hand going on. Envysion’s reporting and alerting is something we’ve been hard at work on and we think you’re going to like it. Find some interesting video you want to share? Check out our groups. I’ll get to that in another post.. down the road.

In the mean time, we’ll leave busting the bad guys to the humans.

01-14-2009, Louisville CO.

At approximately 3pm this afternoon, Envysion Office Manager, Bridget Hamilton, was notified by a fellow building tenant that a suspicious vehicle was parked in a spot normally reserved for this tenant’s moving truck. After dispelling the implication that the suspect vehicle belonged to anyone at Envysion, Bridget quickly reviewed our parking lot video leveraging Envysion’s Motion Mask technology.

With a few clicks of the mouse, Bridget was able to retrieve two-days of recorded video. Within seconds, Envysion’s Motion Mask technology jumped right to the video showing the suspect car entering the lot at 10:08am Tuesday morning. Using a different camera view and the same Motion Mask technology, Bridget witnessed the tenant’s moving truck pulling away at around the same time. Hmmmm…..

At 3:40pm on 1-14-09, Bridget noticed that the moving truck was back in the parking lot and the suspect vehicle had vanished. Again using MVaaS, the perp was witnessed walking from the moving truck back to the suspect vehicle and driving away.

No further attempts were made to contact the suspect and nobody was harmed during the process, just a good lesson learned.

I’m not sure where I learned that phrase.  It was either from my long stint in telecom at Level 3, which makes no sense whatsoever, or from my days in consulting at Bain. In either case, the point of the saying is that if you are trying to get your customers to try something, you had better be using it yourself so that you know exactly what the customer is experiencing.

This applies both directly and indirectly to Envysion and we try to be diligent about it, and we are definitely making strides at doing it more pervasively throughout our business. Let me share some examples with you. In a direct sense, we use our own video service to monitor our building and even some of our employees houses (the outsides of course). The service came in quite handy in the first week in our new building a year ago when a workaholic young woman in marketing was alone in the office late at night. She heard someone rattling the doors and saw from across the cubes a scruffy guy with a backpack “lurking” outside the building. She was naturally afraid to go out to her car so she called our CTO (who lives close to the office) to ask for some assistance. Before he started to come over, Rob got onto our service, looked at video of the doors from a few minutes ago and quickly identified the scruffy villain as none other than our scruffy developer Joey who had forgotten his badge and didn’t know anyone was in the office. This is an obvious one, of course we’re going to use our own video service. Note: I could have used the infamous cone stomping/parking space confrontation example where our neighbors used our own video service to highlight some of our, um, questionable negotiating tactics but I have found making fun of my bosses in public is frowned upon.

An indirect but more recent example of us eating our own dog food is our use of other software as a service businesses for our own purposes. The primary example is our use of Salesforce.com, which is perhaps the best known of all software as a service applications. We use salesforce extensively for our CRM and sales processes.

Why is it important to use other SaaS applications internally that have nothing to do with our service? It helps us experience the SaaS model and apply our learnings to how we operate our service. For example, one of my pet peeves with Salesforce is that I can’t just add a user (when I hire a new salesperson) by clicking a button. Their whole model is software and self service based , but I can’t click a box and sign up for a new user license?  Instead I have to email my account exec, have him send me a pdf of a contract, print it, sign it, scan it and email it back to him, then he adds a license and then I can add a user. This is particularly irritating when I have forgotten to do this ahead of time and a new salesperson shows up for day 1 training and I can’t get them on Salesforce right away until I go through that process. Salesforce isn’t stupid, they probably realize the pain this creates, but they are focused on getting that ink signature on a contract so they make their customers suffer a bit for it. With our service, we think how this will apply to customers that want to add another camera (which has a license implication) to their service. Do they need to call us first and ask us to add another camera license so they can see their new camera or do they plug in their new camera and that automatically triggers an increase in their licenses? There are pros/cons to each approach, but we are better prepared to think the issue through b/c we’ve gone through the same thing from a user’s perspective with our own SaaS tools.

Okay, the only thing worse than a string post is the promise of a string post the next day and then not following up on it for a week.  Guilty.  Actually there a lot of things worse than either of these things, but my apologies anyway.

I posted at some point last week about the pricing decisions we are making around the centralized video storage capability.  In that post I posed the question as to how much storage we should include with our base service, assuming that providing some amount of storage is good so that people could try the service and providing unlimited storage is bad bc that is only good for the few customers that would take advantage of the business model and suddenly archive 10 years worth of video “for free”.

After debating this internally for a little while, we came to the conclusion we were thinking about it wrong.  We had been trying to figure out the minimum amount of storage we could provide so that customers could try that aspect of our service (just enough) but we could still charge a lot of customers that would exceed this threshold.  We concluded this was a shortsighted approach – if we provide 500Mb or 500Gb of central storage with the base service, it doesn’t really matter that much from a cost standpoint - storage is cheap (and saavy customers know this).  What does matter is figuring out how customers are going to use the service and how to make it more valuable for them.  To do that you we need to give customers enough central storage to enable them to utilize it in creative ways that help improve their business.  If we give them too little we’ll constrain their ability to use it and fewer new applications and use cases will likely be created.  If we give them a decent amount of storage (more than enough) and let them play, they’ll figure out ways to use it to create value.  If we pay attention we can learn from this and enhance our service to accomodate their new needs.  At that point they should be willing to pay us more if our enhancements drive real value for them.  They should definitely be willing to pay more than they’d pay for simply another 100Gb of storage.

Net of all of this is we are going to be generous with initial storage to let customers experiment and won’t have a pricing model that is directly tied to the amount of storage you get on the network.  We are after all selling a service, not a hard-drive.

There are a lot of contexts in which you could ask that question.  In our case, we have recently been asking ourselves this question in the context of video storage.  Unlike traditional DVR solutions, there are two types of video storage in our MVaaS architecture – storage on the customer site on the recorder, and centralized storage in the network (actually in a data center attached to the network if you want to pick nits)

The question we are asking ourselves is not how much video is enough to save on the customers premise.  The customer premise question is too straight-forward.  If a customer wants more storage, you put in a bigger hard drive, you give them more storage.  It isn’t challenging technically, it is pretty transparent economically, and it isn’t particularly complicated to think through.  The question we are asking is how much video storage is enough in the network.

This is a bit more complicated thing to think about.  The issue is this – with our MVaaS solution we can enable users to store video off of the recorder at their remote location and into a secure data center.  Users can do this manually by finding video that is interesting and then saving it into the network (so it persists, they can tag/annotate it, share it with others, etc)  They will also be able to do this programmatically (we are about a month away from this) by setting up business rules that will cause video to be pulled off of the recorders and into the network based on specific transactions (like a void transaction on the POS) or events (like the back door opening after hours)  Early customer feedback on this capability has been positive.  The question is how much centralized storage should we include with our service.

Start with the assumption that we are going to provide some amount of storage greater than zero as part of our base packages.  Philosophy here is simply that we want users to try the capability, use it, get hooked and then want more of it – at which point we can charge those users that really use the service while still letting everyone get a taste of the capability.  Add the other assumption that giving away unlimited storage as part of the base package is not a good idea – having a fixed zero price point coupled with an unbounded potential cost structure doesn’t seem too smart and the baking in an average price based on the expected average usage of storage will likely make the base service too expensive for those that don’t use the central storage.

So I’ve narrowed it down then, we are going to include some amount of central storage with our service that is greater than zero but less than infinity.  Isn’t that helpful?

I’m going to violate my self-imposed ban on string-posts and give some more insight tomorrow.  I spent last weekend and the first couple days this week on a vacation with my family (at Legoland among other places) and am still trying to catch up and ditch the nausea I picked up from the Age 5 appropriate Bionacle Blaster ride!  I can definitively say that once is enough when it comes to that ride.

I recently had the opportunity to tap our service using a Mac laptop and I’m happy to say, it worked very well. The application necessary to support access from the Mac OS is called Parallels. Once installed with Windows XP and IE, it’s a simple as an extra double-click from the desktop.

While over 90% of the business community is still using Windows, I’m pleased that the growing number of users running Mac can enjoy our remote enterprise management system.