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 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.

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?

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.

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.

We’ve seen a paradigm shift in the way consumers access and conduct business on the Internet. Companies selling everyday products leveraged mobile technology in this current economic environment to create a value edge in the marketplace. Pizza Hut has over 1.5M downloads to date and likely 10x+ that amount in revenue through their iPhone app.

Following Baron’s speech, I reflected on the past year and how Envysion has leveraged technology and the current economy to reshape our own industry. What I witnessed over the next 48 hours proved that many others had taken notice too. Large enterprise executives stopped by to introduce themselves, key partners walked their clients into our booth for demonstrations and curious vendors stopped by to see what the buzz was all about. My favorite was from the VP of a fellow MURTEC sponsor who said “You guys are all the rage. There’s one every year and word on the street is – you’re it.”

Kudos to every member of the Envysion team. We are beginning to feed on the fruits of our labor in 2009. Bring your appetites, it’s going to be a great 2010!

It didn’t take long for the smile to cross my face as I read through their report.  The first sentence of the report (here’s the full report) was:

“It has a host of names – Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS), Video Surveillance as a Service (VSaaS), Remotely Monitored Video – but whatever the name, 2010 will be the year it moves out of the shadows into the limelight.”

It has been several years since I posted on this blog, introducing the term Managed Video as a Service as a way of giving the new category we were creating a name.  The name isn’t that important, although it is really cool to see it being used by other companies and by research analysts.  What is important is that the segment is maturing enough that there is general recognition of how important it is and how much it is going to change the traditional video surveillance market.

I couldn’t agree more with Alistair’s position – 2010 is definitely going to be a game changing year for all of the SaaS and other as-a-Service models that are beginning to proliferate in the video world.  While there are a lot of different definitions and different business models, we all share the common goal – provide video in a service model that eliminates the barriers (economic, management, complexity) that have traditionally limited customers’ ability to maximize the impact and value of video.

I’ve got a slightly different take on the topic, although I do agree with John’s assessment of the challenges.  While “crowdsourcing” in its pure definition may not take off right away, I think that one of its key principles is already having a huge impact on the video surveillance market.  The principle at the heart of crowdsourcing is this:  providing access to video to a larger number of people can enable more value to be created from that video.

This principle is incredibly simple and very hard to argue with, but many in the industry have not yet come to understand how broad of an impact it will have or what is required to deliver.  Regardless of how much value is being generated from video today (whether in identifying risks, investigating issues, or learning about and improving operations) you could always generate more value by having more people review it.  It could be a numbers game in that you don’t have time to review everything or it could be an expertise game in that there are specific subject matter experts that could identify more useful information from the video.  The “more people” in this could be others inside the company (marketing, operations, finance) or outside the company (remote monitoring providers, guard replacement, operational auditors, LP consultants, cheap labor in India).

Most of the arguments against this trend don’t really attack the concept, they focus on the challenges that keep companies from giving access to more people.

it is hard technically

This is absolutely true, it is very hard to give access to video in a useable way to a large number of people, inside or outside of the company.  Most video systems were designed for onsite use by a handful of expert users.  While many video systems are now remotely accessable, many require significant effort including VPNs and lot of IT intensive setup to make this happen.  Extending video access to 1000s of people across 1000s of locations has some very difficult challenges that many video providers have not historically addressed.  MVaaS is in the forefront of addressing these challenges to eliminate technology as a barrier to wider spread video utilization.

it requires a much more sophisticated approach to access control

Privacy concerns are the most commonly stated issue, but the access control challenges start well before you think about giving access to your video  to Joe the Plumber.  When you had 20 people using video in your company your access control concerns were likely binary: someone had access to all the video or they had access to none of the video.  When you have 1,000 people accessing a large number of locations you have to worry about which sites they get access to, what they can do with the video, etc.  It is materially more complicated and more important to control who can see what.  Extend that one step further to outside organizations that you trust (a consultant, a remote guard company, etc.) and you need another layer of complexity to manage access within their organization.  Moving even closer to the crowdsourcing model and giving access to people you may not yet know you need mechanisms for ensuring reviewers are certified, flagging inappropriate or ineffective reviewers, etc.  MVaaS goes a long way to addressing the first two, but the third is an area, while solveable, that has not been fully addressed by the market.

it is not always economical (value of information generated greater than the incremental cost to generate)

Once you solve the technical issues and ensure that only the people you want to review video are able to do so, the remaining question is whether the additional viewers can create value for you at a price you are willing to pay.  This requires that video be efficiently useable by the extended group of people and that the output of their review be easily consumable by the organization.  Neither of these are true with most video systems today.  Telling a potential user to review hours of video on a clunky interface is not efficient.  Using POS data or targeted video analytics to limit the video that must be reviewed is efficient.  Creating a bunch of PDF audit documents or sending thousands of stand-alone email alerts is not easily consumable.  Using an easily configurable web interface for reviewers to create audits or capture new data from the video and then allowing the company to massage and filter the results is easily consumable.

Companies and organizations will continue to expand the number of people that have access to their video as it will most certainly increase their return on that investment.   While it may be a while before crowdsourcing becomes a material business model,  companies like Envysion are working to address the challenges that this broader access creates.

For those of you with children that leave lights on all over the house, or who turn on two electric ovens to 450 degrees to cook two pizzas, the Insight will alert you when your power usage exceeds a pre-configured threshold, signaling an alarm that clues everyone into the situation immediately.

After lunch, my mind started spinning with how this service could be optimized for restaurants.  The key to Tendril is that it can use information from multiple devices to make smart energy decisions.  For me, the obvious information tie into restaurants was point of sale data.  What if you could interconnect POS trending data with energy management?  How about turning on/off ovens or other cooking devices based on historical trending of the average/peak number of guests for that day?

While it’s early, smart energy is the way of the future and I suspect the return on investment for retail is just around the corner.