Zoosk is (apparently) an online dating service that just surpassed Match.com in total traffic recently.  Their advertising is funny but over the top (you’ll likely only find it late night on 2nd tier cable stations) and definitely not safe for watching with, oh,  just about anyone I can think of in my life.  On the surface, there isn’t a lot that we have in common with them.  They are a consumer play, they are a freemium service, and well… they make money by helping singles hook up, I mean find lasting lifelong relationships.

Despite the differences we may have, we do have one very important thing in common and it is on this front that I aspire to be like them.  Zoosk, like Envysion, is a Software as a Service provider.  I had the pleasure of listening to their co-CEO , Alex Mehr, last week talk about their business.  One of the coolest things he shared was how they run their software development shop and test the various capabilities and functions that they offer to their customers. 

They run two distinct instances of their application at all times (an A and B instance).  They push new functionality and make changes to both instances every day or every other day.  When they want to try something new, they come up with their two best ideas, implement one version on the A instance and one version on the B instance, measure the results, and then kill the loser – putting the winning idea on both platforms.

I thought we were advanced with our service where we push new capabilities and try new features every two weeks.  These guys are leveraging the benefits of SaaS to a degree that I hadn’t even contemplated before.  Poor Rob Hagens – I am now going to be badgering him on why we can’t do releases more frequently, try more things, and react even faster to customer requirements!

Now, before you get all spun up pointing out that Zoosk is a consumer play and their user requirements are not anything like the traditional security focused video surveillance users that have effectively used the same basic video functionality for the past 10 years and so why do you need to change functionality or react to customer requirements when they don’t ever change… remember, our largest customer has over 1,300 users but only 3 people in loss prevention/security.  1,297 of them had never used video before and are using it for things that even they didn’t know they would want to do before they tried our service.  That is just one customer.  Expand that to the entire emerging market MVaaS is creating and you have a whole bunch of new users and requirements happening very quickly.  The winners in this space will be those that can react quickly and get customers what they want.  Two week iterations on a single instance of the platform may be enough to maintain our lead today, but if the MVaaS market continues to grow as it has been, it may not be enough down the road.

Get ready Rob – I may ask you to spend some time checking out Zoosk as a business expense!

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.

Sand Hill just released a new study on cloud computing, “Leaders in the Cloud,” and it found that the #1 driver of cloud computing adoption was business agility. They go on to explain that agility in their view incorporates a number of business concepts including flexibility, speed, and innovation.

I reflected on the study and the agility take-away a bit as I was flying to DC for a customer visit. At the end of the day the number one driver for managed video and our MVaaS solution is and will continue to be profit improvement. Together with incredible return on investment, customers see compelling value that in turn drives adoption. While I understand that agility for a customer has value in and of itself I would caution customers and providers alike that going quick without purpose can be just as dangerous as going slowly. As a provider I would never want to lose sight of the application use and bottom line value delivered for customers. Certainly agility for its own sake was not the take-away of the Sand-Hill study. Actually the punch line was as it should be, that adoption will be driven by business value and I could agree more. It may sound strange that someone in the cloud space would deliver a cautionary message – to clarify, my point here is that agility is part of the story. Just as the cloud is part of the story. The cloud offers fundamental advantages to customers and providers alike. It can be an accelerator and differentiator but I hope we learned lessons from the internet explosion and the ongoing mobility boom that at the end of the day it is about value add. Just setting up a web-page didn’t translate to long term success just like putting an application or platform in the cloud won’t either.

So that said, agility is an important part and enabler of the MVaaS value proposition. Customers who are using our application can rapidly scale additional locations, users, and usage. They can immediately receive application updates and requested improvements & refinements. They can easily integrate additional business systems to video and leverage social media influenced collaboration tools. A customer can focus their internal IT resources on other areas and IT investment on value adding solutions vs. help desks and administrators. Customers can immediately leverage Envysion’s growing set of best practices, see their usage statistics and drive continuous operations and profit improvement all in real time.

Yes, at Envysion we put the advantages of being in the cloud and a software as a service provider to good use and we are excited to position our customers with greater business agility. But for us our #1 source of pride will always be delivering bottom line profit improvement and value delivered for customers.

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.