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.

Does your video management system link directly to a network operations center with technicians standing by to help you?

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.

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.

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.