Last week marked my 4th trip to one of the largest security conferences in the U.S., ISC West. I’ve posted before about the evolution of my trips there and how I’m much more comfortable now wandering the vast sea of video and security providers than I was when I first got into this space.
We never exhibit at the show as it is way to big and doesn’t put us in front of the key decision makers in our target segments. Having said that, we always go commando and wander the halls talking to potential technology partners and generally staying abreast of who’s doing what. I spent a full day there last week doing just that. My general takeaway was again that I think the industry is rather broadly and consistently missing the big picture.
ISC West is a great place for big and small providers alike to exhibit their wares, showing off their latest and greatest technologies. The show floor is overwhelming with all of the video monitors, HD cameras, video analytics demos, and other cool technologies. The majority of product announcements are around the latest version of someone’s DVR, their camera, their software or their storage capacity. You can see the highest resolution megapixel cameras that are available, you can find someone with a crazy amount of storage, you can get a demo of some intriguing analytic capabilities or watch the same guy from last year build a video wall on the coolest touch screen projector you’ll ever see. Lots and lots of new technology – bright and shiny things.
What you don’t see is the killer application, and this is where I think that the traditional video industry is missing the mark. There are too many companies that view innovation only as finding the next bell and whistle for their product or making it see more detail, store more video, or do something else better than it did before. This is important, I’m not suggesting that it isn’t valuable for the industry – there are a lot of applications that will benefit from some of the incremental and evolutionary changes that we see each year in the space. The logic of these companies is that if they sell widgets and their widget “goes to 11″ when the competitor’s only goes to 10, they will sell more widgets than the competitor, which seems rational enough.
What they appear not to be focused on, however, is finding the killer application. There’s a good definition of the killer app on wikipedia, which I’ll reference here as well:
“A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app), in the jargon of computer programmers and video gamers, has been used to refer to any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware like a gaming console, operating system or other software. A killer app can substantially increase sales of the platform on which it runs.”
Said differently, a killer app is something that creates so much value for customers that it can drive orders of magnitude more demand for the underlying platform on which it is running. In our world, this would be an application that is so powerful that it actually increases the demand for video services and technologies (cameras, recorders, storage, etc.) rather than just competes for a share of the existing pie.
I’m sure that there are a tremendous number of companies that were at ISC West, were they to read this post, that would comment that this is exactly what they are trying to develop (or may already even claim to have developed). I am certainly not in a position to judge whether a given company has or hasn’t done this, but I do have strong opinions on what you’d have to have done for this to be true.
I’ll post again tomorrow with my thoughts on what makes a killer application in the world of video surveillance.