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.

Have you read Behind the Cloud yet? Well, it is probably an understatement to say that we can all learn a thing or two from the success that Salesforce.com has achieved.  Of course I was particularly eager to take in Benioff’s insights given our common roots in MVaaS and always good to learn from the best.  The book is set up as a collection of ‘plays’.  Each one is easily digested and I’d suggest many apply to all business models though obviously the focus is on cloud based companies. Overall it’s a good read, definitely worthy to bring along for your next plane ride.

While Salesforce is wildly successful, good business advice stands up when applied to others so I thought it might be fun to see how some of the play’s in Behind the Cloud apply and hold up to our experience in managed video at Envysion.

First up, #57 – Let Your Customer Drive Innovation. While part of the message here is obvious (listen to what your customers want) the real point is how the ‘as a service’ model lends itself uniquely to this mission. How you ask? Well a couple ways. First, because the intelligence resides in the cloud, and not on PC’s & servers, the ‘as a service’ model accelerates and simplifies the process of delivering improvements. Let’s be honest, traditional software upgrades can be a pain and when things are a pain you do less of them. How many of us are still using old versions of applications because we don’t feel like downloading or buying the new one? For traditional players it is a barrier to the roll-out, listen, and improve virtuous cycle. Second area that is unique in an ‘as a service’ environment is the ability to get visibility to what customers are doing with your application in real time and across all customers. What are they using? How? In an ‘as a service environment’ you can see real-time stats and respond. In Behind the cloud the salesforce.com example of how they watched customer usage to evolve thier ‘tabs’ is an example.

For me this play totally hit home. At Envysion we have an agile development model and literally release a new upgraded version of our application every few weeks. We have both formal and informal vehicles for customer feedback and are constantly using that to shape our development. Just this past Friday I sat down with Rob our CTO and we were talking through an upcoming feature improvement to our video search. In addition to the direct feedback/ask we had gotten from a customer we were able to consider usage stats from all searches (e.g. what time frames were customers pulling up) as we talked through a set of options. Of course we ended the conversation by agreeing that we would circle back again with power-users and vet our proposed approach. At Envysion we directly translate customer asks or new customer requirements into real time improvements in the application. We can see usage and build knowledge from that (e.g. exception reports that work well) we are also uniquely positioned to deliver these changes with no customer IT requirement. Customers can simply log on via a browser and boom they have what they asked for.

So while all companies benefit from listening and responsiveness to customers, there are some structural advantages that the ‘As a Service’ model provides. Behind the Cloud gives the Salesforce.com view and I can say firsthand that they are also in action here at Envysion!

Read a good blog post by Brad Feld (a successful local, Boulder-based VC and prolific blogger) on how to approach planning.  In it he challenges management teams and their boards to spend some portion of their time thinking about how to add another zero to one of their key metrics.

How can we get from 100 customers to 1,000 customers?  How can we increase our average daily usage from 500 to 5,000 etc.  This type of thinking encourages companies to think beyond the tactical “how do we grow revenue 20% next year” and to focus some attention on how you change your business performance by an order of magnitude.

As I was reflecting on the aspects of our business that I would like to hang another zero onto, I thought about one metric on which we had already achieved this feat.  In fact, not only did we add one zero – we hung two zero’s onto the metric, which for those that stopped doing math in their head means we increased the metric by 100x.  Curious as to what it was?

Active video users in a single company.  In one of our larger customers we increased the number of active users of video from ~10 to over 1,000.   I’ve thrown this stat around before in prior blog posts, but I’m guessing that many folks haven’t really reflected on the true significance.  Think about it for a little bit.  I don’t care what functionality you have or how amazing your technology is, if you only have 10 people using it you can’t compete with a company that has 1,000 people driving value.

I’ve got all kinds of ideas on the next metric I’d like to increase by an order of magnitude, but in the meantime I think we’ve started off with a pretty good one.

Read a good blog post today over at Sandhill.com on Meaningful Information by Harold Hambros.  While the post had nothing to do with SaaS, video or MVaaS, his main thesis is squarely in synch with our philosophy at Envysion.

To paraphrase, it states that without a way to provide meaningful data to end-users in a manner that is easy for them to consume, having incredibly rich features and extensive access to data will not create significant value.

Some of my favorite excerpt are:

“what business needs is an interface to its enterprise system that sparks excitement in its target community of human users – excitement in the fact that their work is easier, more enjoyable, that they are more effective, and that the employer is supplying tools that reinforce their belief that they are part of a winning team”

“the true measure of a system’s performance isn’t its raw power, but its efficiency and effectiveness”

“The unfortunate reality is that unless it’s designed to be easy to use, most human beings aren’t capable of figuring out how to make that request in an acceptable amount of time”

One of the biggest differentiators of Envysion’s service versus traditional video surveillance solutions is that our entire business model is focused exactly on this goal: to make meaningful information (in our case relevant video tied to business system data) easily and efficiently available to as many people both within and outside the organization that the company wants to have access.

It’s not about the technology, it’s about empowering people to use technology to create value.

Fredrik Nilsson of Axis Communications gives a talk promoting the benefits of SaaS.

While the talk focuses a bit on security applications, it’s refreshing to see that they’re not focusing exclusively on “remote recording” for video.   Instead they are focusing more on “hosted software” aspect, where the video managment system is hosted.

The power point presentation does mention that DVR’s for the hosted service are often deployed on site.  This is an important requirement for many if not most applications in order to make the solution cost effective.

A new report from Retail Systems Research states:

while retailers that use IT strategically have the opportunity to turn technological advantage into real long term market gains, most survey respondents report a growing backlog of demand for IT services driven by lack of governance, tangled obsolete application portfolios, and siloed departments each clamoring for their own solutions. 

MVaaS can help alleviate these issues because it is a managed solution, requiring little more than permission from the IT department to deploy.  With no servers or software to manage on desktops and managed DVR’s, the solution is simple to deploy.  This helps address limited resources and managing of many tangled applications.  When an IT solution is very easy to deploy and requires little involvement from IT, many of details of getting the job done become non-issues.

My last post about a week ago was about how I felt like I finally have a strong enough grasp of where Envysion fits in the broader world of video/security that congregates at ISC West, making the conference seem smaller and more manageable to me than it ever has in the past.  In that post, I promised to follow up with the key differentiator about our service that really hit home with me while I was there.

I spend my time at ISC West (and ASIS as well) doing two primary things: talking to customers/partners and checking out other players in the space.  I did the usual rounds this year and checked out everyone from the traditional PC based DVR manufacturers to the IP camera VMS software guys.  I saw a lot of really interesting solutions and some very advanced capabilities.  One IP VMS company in particular had a really cool demo.  Part of the appeal of the demo was the crazy touch screen projector that they were using for the demo – I hadn’t seen one before but it makes for one really impressive demo (sorry for the tangent there – I clearly had gadget envy)  Aside from the impressive projector, the demo showed how the software could easily manage 100s of cameras and let you create video walls and move doznes of camera views around and do 20 other things with lots of cameras simultaneously that were all very advanced.

A year or two ago this would have concerned me, seeing a bunch of advanced features that we don’t even have on our roadmap.  This year it didn’t phase me a bit.  Why not?  Because it has become increasingly clear to me that we are solving a very different problem for a very different end user/customer than almost every single provider I saw at ISC West.  The majority, if not all, of the video providers at ISC West are making their video solutions better and more powerful for the same small group within the business that utilize video today.  They are targeting the handful of people that are in loss prevention, security, or risk management.  They are adding capabilities to differentiate themselves and add value for this core group of people, hence all the really advanced features.  Our model is the exact opposite.  While our solution is valuable for this same group, our focus is on making video simple and powerful enough that the rest of the company, in addition to LP and security, can use it and derive value from it.  Two very different strategies with very different implications.

If all you care about is the security or LP group you get to deal with power users and don’t have to worry about the scalability of the service or having to manage software on lots of people’s computers.  You can innovate by adding bells and whistles that add incremental value to your existing users.  If, however, you care about the rest of the company, you get to deal with a range of technical abilities (including the very technically illiterate) and you have to worry about an entirely different scale/network challenge and a much higher bar from an expected availability standpoint.

You can argue the merits of both strategies, but there aren’t very many if any other players out there going down our path yet.  This is great for us as we continue to build this category and separate ourselves from the traditional video players.  At some point soon, however, I’d expect some more folks to start to think about the simple question “If you think you get an ROI on your video investment when 10 people in your company can use video, how much of an impact do you think you can have on your business when 1000 people are benefiting?”

As I was about to deliver a SaaS overview to a large partner sales force, the SVP used this quote during his introduction of Envysion’s MVaaS technology to the team. It has stuck with me ever since and as Enysion continues to evolve, the impact of this statement gets stronger and stronger.

I’ve had the opportunity to mindshare with many of our competitive representatives who have been in the business for, in some cases, decades. I love getting the backhanded question, “Envysion, hmpfff – isn’t that some kind of web thing?” I explain our approach to the market, technology, benefits, etc… and I usually get looked at like my nose is on backwards. Following one lively debate that started with “MVaaS, that won’t work”, I was actually asked if we were hiring.

Calling MVaaS disruptive is sometimes an understatement as we are clearly seeing the fear in the traditional competition’s eyes and actions. We are disruptive because we’re not just selling boxes. We’re not just selling a service. We’re not simply trying to become a part of an LP budget. Our consultative approach becomes part of a larger organizational solution that leverages managed video to mitigate risk, improve operational efficiencies and increase profitability. We aim to become a partner, not simply a vendor.

Like so many other industries before it, security and surveillance is experiencing an IP transformation. We’ve seen what happens to companies that don’t get ahead of the curve or just hunker down and hope the fad will pass. Just open up the business section – they’re dead.

Most video providers that pitch integration with point of sale are selling a promise that they can’t or don’t deliver.  The promise is simple – the system can show you the video associated with any transaction you want across your company.  Look up any product, any employee, any amount and simply click on the transaction and you’ll see the video.  Sounds pretty simple.

Problem is, most of the video POS integrations sold don’t work as advertised.  How do I know this? A couple of different things lead me to this conclusion.

The guys that end up supporting POS Integrations aren’t believers.  We were just at a conference with a major retail POS vendor and all of their top VARs.  Consensus was that there aren’t solutions out there that work reliably and it is a big source of frustration for the VARs who have been burned by video vendors pitching integrations that don’t work.

Companies can’t be using the integration if it is broken and they don’t notice.  We are tightly integrated with a leading retail POS vendor and discovered a change that they had made to their core service that “broke” their POS integration interface.  This would have impacted every other vendor that used the integration method, but we were the only ones that noticed, much less worked with the vendor to find a solution.  If someone else was actually using the POS integration you’d think their customers would have squawked.

Text overlay isn’t a meaningful integration.  POS integration for many video vendors means text overlay of the receipt data onto the video itself.  While they can accurately argue that this “works” in a lot of cases, text overlay doesn’t give you the capability I described to find video based on POS data, it gives you the ability to see POS data when you have found video.  There is a big difference.  It also only gives you the data that shows up on receipts – where do you get the voids, cancels and no sales (the data people really want to see)?

Traditional video solutions can’t respond to the moving target of customer transaction data.  More advanced (but still old school) PC-based systems rely on printer level interfaces to parse receipt data so that it can be turned into searchable fields.  What happens when the customer changes their receipt format to put in a new line for a promotion or just changes one of the codes or does anything that messes with the format? The parsing software on the PC-based DVR won’t know what to do with it and it will result in a garbled information.  If the DVR vendor figures it out at all, they will have to figure out how to get the customer a specific update that works based on their specific receipt.  How often do you think that happens?

My personal experience with the state of the video POS integration market is that it is over-promised, tends to be underutilized in practice, doesn’t work in a lot of cases, and is typically restricted to the mundane and not very useful text overlay.  We believe we’ve got a solution that addresses these issues and this is one of the bigger differentiators of MVaaS.  As of today we support several flavors of Micros, Aloha, Radiant RPOS, Radiant Lighthouse, PAR, Positouch, Tomax, several proprietary POS systems from our customers – and I can see in real-time what % of our systems are working across all of our customers.  I could list every POS under the sun and say we integrate like a lot of the traditional DVR companies do, but again I don’t count text overlay as POS integration even if it is on our service.

In the telecom engineering world a huge focus area is on having inexpensive, robust devices out at the edge of the network which could be 100% remotely managed using automated processes.  All the edge devices (say a router that is at a customer’s location) must have a very consistent and methodical way of being configured and managed in order to scale up to serve millions of customers.

In the managed video world, probably the best inexpensive and robust  edge devices are “DVR appliances”.  But unlike a managed Ethernet Switch, an IP router or DSL modem, you can’t pick and choose your DVR box from a list of vendors and hook up to one’s centralized viewing, command and control system.

In the managed network equipment world, we have well documented SNMP interfaces, configuration files and scriptable command lines that can be integrated into centralized management systems.  But in the DVR world there are proprietary protocols, no remote access to important administrative features and a lack of scriptable or programmable interfaces to get at all the functionality of the DVR.

For central viewing, command and control we made our own Envysion Video service which is built from the ground up to scale to manage information events (mostly point of sale information) and video.  We also had to make our own DVR appliance (The Envysion EnVR) to meet our needs, but it’d be great if we could buy them from 3-5 vendors instead.  Maybe someday.

In the late 80’s and even early 90’s, IP networks and the products used to build them were very immature.  Companies were building network routers out of PC’s running off the shelf unix systems and the software being used to run the Internet backbone was literally, fresh out of the lab from last week.  Each box had hand-configured specialized configurations by engineers with a lot of tacit knowledge of how the system worked. Some vendors had proprietary systems that were easier to manage, but only worked with their own software, between their boxes and nobody elses.  This just didn’t fly very far in the network world where everything has to talk to each other.

Being a “network guy”, I see a lot significant parallels to this in the world of network video.