Last week we held our first webcast of the year, “Top 5 Tips on Loss Prevention in Restaurants” kicking off our ’12 webinar series. Mike Davis, Director of Loss Prevention at Rosenfield Restaurants shared his top 5 ways he drives bottom line improvement,  including:

1.  Audit High Risk Transactions.  Certain transactions can be classified as high-risk that include; voided sales, no sale, zero Dollar (or small amount) transactions, and cash refunds.  These transactions should be audited to identify potential fraud and theft.
2.  Good Cash Handling: An effective cash handling should cover; cash counts, single-drawer accountability, cash drops, and cash transactions with customers.  Cash, as a payment type, isn’t going anywhere in the near term.  And with cash comes increase risk that you need to be mindful of.
3.  ID Trends and Chase Your Tail: Compare store performance and employees relatively by looking for deviations from the norm.  Drill in on stores and employees that fall on the outer bounds of expected performance among key metrics.
4.  Protect the Back Door: Manage the back door with the appropriate policies and procedures such as times when the back door should not be opened, when (perhaps always) the backdoor is to be locked, backdoor should never be propped open, etc.
5. Engage Your Managers: Engage with your managers to get them bought-in to the loss prevention program selling them on the benefits to best control their stores. Your managers are accountable for profitability and therefore, reducing shrink. It’s in their best interest to get with the program.

To increase effectiveness of your loss prevention program and ability to drive impact from these Top 5, Mike uses MVaaS (and Envysion specifically).  Mike  shared that he sees managed video as a key strategic tool that enables the program. The integration of the point of sales system and video enables him to successfully employ these top 5 strategies (and many more) in his loss prevention program and the most important part is that Mike is seeing bottom line impact from the program. As he said “Having the video analytics next to POS data tells the entire story of what’s going on.  A picture is worth at thousand words.”

View the recorded webcast here.   

Big thank you to Mike Davis and to those who attended the webinar last week.  More Webinars to come later this year including other industry areas (retail, cinema) and expanded functional areas (marketing, merchandising, Ops) – we look forward to helping you deliver bottom line impact . 

Calling all MVaaS, VSaaS and hosted video providers, customers and end users, channel and solution partners – Save the date.

3^rd Annual MVaaS Summit – Unleash Video
October 7-9, 2012
Boulder, CO

This year the summit will focus on how we all can unleash the power of video based business intelligence in the market, the channel, and across all potential customer segments.  Managed and hosted models open up new video capabilities and never before thought of use cases.  Video is no longer constrained to a limited value proposition with just a few users, we now have an opportunity to unleash video and deliver a tool to customers that improves decision making and drives profit improvement.  The unfiltered visibility video provides gives an understanding of what actually is happening at the site level – solving the age old challenge of ensuring proper execution and giving an understand of the real life story behind the numbers.  Please join us and help accelerate and shape this transformation!

I’ll have more info about registration in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we are accepting speaker proposals for engaging presentations, use cases, breakout sessions or panels. Please send your ideas over and lets talk.  We do also have a few limited sponsorship opportunities available. If you’re interested in sponsoring, send an email to Hayley.

Looking forward to seeing you this fall.

It’s tough being a small business. The deck is inherently stacked against you. Resource constraints in terms of time, money, and man power force your hand day in and day out when making tactical decisions.

And it’s tough – borderline counter intuitive – to spend money on technology to get ahead. The right technologies need to be viewed as an investment – they will increase your efficiency and efficacy – providing a return (ROI) and thereby increasing your chances at running an on-going viable business.

A couple of days ago Market Place (APM) had a piece on Technology’s Haves and Have Nots. The piece basically outlined how small business owners are way behind in adopting technology that will help them run their companies better and how it is necessary for small businesses to embrace the technologies that will lower the barriers for their customers to find them and ultimately purchase from them as opposed to their competition.

Managed Video (MVaaS) is such a technology for small businesses – especially small retailers and restaurants. Managed Video provides business owners an omniscient view into their operations. It’s not about being Big Brother; it’s about perspective, literally. It’s about understanding who your customers are (demographically), how they interact with your merchandise and your staff, how they flow through your store. If you believe in being analytical, MVaaS gives you the ability to supplant gut-based decisions with data-based decisions.

MVaaS is an “approachable” technology for small businesses. There’s no IT involvement to get set-up and viewing video is as easy as opening your email in a web browser. And an affordable monthly subscription means you don’t have to come up with a big cash outlay to get up and running.

So in an economic environment where it is tough to get by, you need any sensible advantage you can get your hands on. Embrace technologies that will help you. View it as an investment, not an expense. And prosper.

Some customers came to us recently and said, “…you know, we love the new interface, but we would really love it if you could make it so that video player was bigger.”

You asked, we listened.

Today we are happy to announce the release of a newly redesigned player that increases the player viewing area by 75% on constrained, lower resolution monitors that are typical in the back-of-house operations of many of our customers.

This is all made possible by the way we operate at Envysion. Because the application our users utilize on a daily basis is hosted in cloud, in quickly responding to some customers’ requests, ALL customers benefit as we deploy new software upgrades several times a month. This morning when you login into the Envysion application on your browser, you have the upgrade. You, nor your IT team, do not have to usher through any software updates… they’re just there as we release new code. Easy as that. Easy as MVaaS.

Keep the feedback coming . We are eager to please and innovate with our customers.

Everyone seems to be talking about social media these days, even Thomas Friedman, who took some time last Sunday to focus his column on how the convergence of social media and cloud computing is accelerating everything from innovation to competition. This convergence has important implications for many different industries, including Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS), a cloud-based video platform that enables business intelligence and increased profits through leveraging the compounded insight of multiple users, just like the way that network effects make social media so powerful.

“The latest phase in the I.T. revolution is being driven by the convergence of social media — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga — with the proliferation of cheap wireless connectivity and Web-enabled smartphones and ‘the cloud’ — those enormous server farms that hold and constantly update thousands of software applications, which are then downloaded (as if from a cloud) by users on their smartphones, making them into incredibly powerful devices that can perform myriad tasks.

“The emergence of the cloud, explained Alan Cohen, a vice president of Nicira, a new networking company, ‘means than anyone can have the computing resources of Google and rent it by the hour.’ This is speeding up everything — innovation, product cycles and competition.”

Just like the accessibility of the cloud and the powerful network effects of social media, managed video is fully hosted online and accessible to multiple users within an organization, providing compounding business intelligence from the many different insights of these users. Managers can remotely monitor real-time business activity in any store, sharing important videos instantly with any other user to gain actionable insight into operations, marketing, and human resources.

Friedman goes on to describe how the social media revolution is transforming business not only in terms of accelerated innovation, but also increased openness, collaboration and more. “Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed — everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don’t have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges — from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before — as individuals.

“A is for alignment. ‘There has never been a more important time to have all your ships sailing in the same direction,’ said Benioff. “The power of social media is that it is easier than ever to both articulate, and reinforce, the vision and values that create and inspire alignment.” And L is for the leadership that does that. Leadership in a SOCIAL world has to be a mix of bottom-up and top-down. Leaders need to inspire, enable and empower everything coming up from below in a company or a social movement and then edit and sculpt it with a vision from above into a final product.”

The disruptive forces of cloud computing and social media are here to stay, making innovative platforms that leverage the power of these forces the true leaders of the future. Managed video leverages social and collaborative online approaches to transform the video surveillance industry from a reactive process used only to investigate incidents after they have already occurred to a proactive business insight tool.

Innovation is more essential than ever in today’s competitive global economy, but many organizations have traditionally been reluctant to take the potentially expensive risks involved with making a disruptive change. However, with cloud computing and online software as a service, innovation has become increasingly affordable and accelerated. “Cloud computing enables companies to quickly acquire processing, storage or services as needs dictate,” explains Joe McKendrick in a recent blog on Forbes entitled Cloud Computing Now Makes it Easier and Cheaper to Innovate. “They can just as quickly shed those resources when a project is completed. As a result, companies with more advanced cloud sites are able to rapidly move through experimental or prototyping stages.”

A great example of an online resource that companies can use to rapidly innovate and gain insight into their business is Managed Video as a Service or MVaaS. Based on the Software as a Service (SaaS) model that Salesforce has made so popular, MVaaS is not only affordable: it actually increases profitability by 10-15% by putting easy-to-use, online video data into the hands of the entire organization, providing valuable insight into operations, marketing, and more.  Rather than the old Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) model of recording video on site and then reviewing it only when something unusual happens, MVaaS enables thousands of users within a company to utilize  remote surveillance to better understand and improve the day-to-day, store-level operations of their business. With automatic alerts, integration with business data tools like the Point of Sale (POS) system and powerful exception reporting capabilities, not only does MVaaS enable businesses to increase profits, the service also helps reduce theft, better manage human resources, identify training opportunities for staff and ways to make operations more efficient, enhance marketing in store promotions, and improve security.

In short, this new way of managing video has the potential for impact across all aspects of a business, enabling better service and operations, and could be applied to many industries. The service can be rapidly deployed and customized for each client, providing the ability to quickly verify the return on investment. “The ability to quickly test and deploy new innovations is available to all types of businesses,” continues McKendrick. “Add the ability to provision those workloads to on-demand cloud resources, and a huge weight — in cost and risk — has been lifted off innovation. Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago.”

MVaaS is an excellent example of a cloud-based service that offers an accelerated opportunity for businesses to innovate and improve rapidly across the entire organization. Through connecting the concepts of video surveillance, business intelligence and SaaS, MVaaS has transformed surveillance from a reactive industry based on hardware upgrades and dusty tapes in boxes to a proactive tool based on rapid scalability, automatic software updates and data storage in the cloud. Rather than thinking of video surveillance as insurance, companies can now use it to directly increase profits and improve performance. The future looks bright for MVaaS and other cloud-based industries, which is exactly the kind of innovation that our country needs to strengthen the economy overall for the next generation.

Saw a banner ad the other day that reminded me that Envysion thinks differently than the majority of incumbent video providers.  The ad was for one of the leading IP camera manufacturers – it had a very simple tagline: “IP cameras drive increases in sales”.

That kind of statement not only is silly, (how can a camera by itself without anyone using it increase sales), but also demonstrates that the industry still has a technology, not user or application focus.  People can use cameras, whether they are analog or IP, to better understand what is happening in their business.  The thought is that they can then make better decisions with this new knowledge that will enable them to improve the way they operate.  For this to be true, business people have to look at video, see something that is interesting, be able to learn from it and then take action on that insight.  The camera is one piece of the solution, but the key to delivering the value is the person that is to use the technology.  What are they trying to learn?  What tools do they need to learn it? How can you make the learning more proactive and more efficient?  How do you help them communicate the lessons through their organization and make them actionable?  Any increase in sales, or any other improvement, would be driven by the user and this whole process and system, not by a specific camera.

So back to the ad. IP cameras drive increases in sales.  The intended message, given it was an IP camera manufacturer’s ad, must have been that IP cameras, more so than analog cameras, help users increase sales.  What is it about IP cameras that makes this true?  Are they claiming that because of the higher resolution found in many IP cameras that suddenly people make better decisions?  Maybe – but the video provider should be explicit about the impact for the user and how they are going to use that increased resolution to learn something that they otherwise couldn’t and how that will translate into increased sales, not on the fact that it is an IP vs. analog camera.

I see this same thought process with many companies that are promoting MVaaS services.  They implement some form of web-based or hosted video and then make claims about how it will enable you to improve your business and generate a compelling ROI.  MVaaS is a service delivery method, hosted video is an architecture – if you don’t use them differently than you would traditional video, then you may save some money on the cost side but you won’t get anything more material out of them than you did your old video solution, certainly not an increase in sales.  The technology is the enabler, how you use it is the difference maker.

At Envysion we have a differentiated technology that helps us create tremendous value, but the value is delivered by focusing on the user and how this technology can change the way they impact their business, providing them with new insights that they couldn’t have gotten before.  The customers getting the most value from MVaaS don’t care whether the video is hosted or distributed or a combination, whether some or none or all of the cameras are IP – all they care about is whether they can easily get to the insights and do something with them.

The video market as a whole will increase dramatically once more vendors start to focus on the user and how to help them drive value instead of promoting technology for technology’s sake.

Circling back to the Managed & Hosted Video Summit (see recap) a key focus was on partnering across the ecosystem.  Effective partnering can serve a number of purposes for MVaaS players.  Most importantly, it can accelerate growth.  Partners can deliver capabilities that you don’t have, can deliver complimentary value to fill out a solution for an end customer and of course can also deliver channels to market and/or scale to market.  Any of these if effectively executed can help accelerate growth.  A related benefit of these type of partners is the potential to enable MVaaS providers to focus on what their core competence and not dilute efforts at this critical time for the space.  Of course these benefits don’t come without a price - its critical to both sides of a partnership to set clear goals/objective and select well otherwise partnering can become a distraction and not deliver.

From a MVaaS & Hosted segment maturation perspective partnering is also reflective of validation of the space and the growth opportunity that is present.  When large incubmant players in the ecosystem start looking for MVaaS & Hosted partners as a path to participate in the growth they foresee they are accepting the shift that is occuring (to cloud computing and to the value prop offered).  At the Summit we heard discussion of a number of partnerships that I would say fall into this category.  A few that come to mind are Axis and EMC, Cernium and Sprint and Envysion and Sony.  Obviously I’ve got the most insight into the Sony-Envysion partnership so I’ll use that here.

In the beginning of June, Sony & Envysion announceda partnership to bring integrated solutions to market that combine Envysion’s MVaaS solution with Sony’s leading edge IP cameras and video surveillance technologies.  The partnership involves co-selling, co-marketing, as well as co-development of unique solutions that both companies will bring to market in the retail, restaurant, cinema and services segments.  Customers benefit from the complimentary nature of the partnership - MVaaS as a strategic management tool that delivers bottom line impact across loss prevention, operations, marketing etc and Sony’s leading technologies that accelerate and enable the solution and deliver one of the best known and respected brands in the world.  The partnership goal is to accelerate growth and adoption of the joint solution…the opportunity is certainly there and I will circle back over the months to share how its going.  From a segment perspective it is also additional validation.  The biggest brands and largest players in the world and across the ecosystem recognize the opportunity and potential disruption MVaaS can deliver and are jumping in the game.  Of course these are just the early plays, it will be fun to watch the next set of moves unfold.   Thoughts?

Today we released our Next Generation application and it is immediately deployed and available to all of our users.  Unlike traditional video surveillance providers, Envysion’s Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS) application applies the Software as a Service (SaaS) model to video, meaning every Envysion user has instant access to new features designed to increase productivity and profit impact of video the moment we deploy them. Since the application lives in the cloud, we eliminate the IT burden of software and equipment upgrades prevalent in traditional video surveillance products. Our users simply log into our web-based application to access the most up to date version of the Envysion application. Envysion’s MVaaS is also capable of rapidly scaling to thousands of users and locations, overcoming the challenges of managing an enterprise-wide video system.

As a SaaS company, we give these thousands of users an accelerated development cycle. We are able to take customer feedback, translate it into feature requirements, develop new features and elicit additional feedback to continually improve our application. In many cases this entire cycle can occur in as little as a few weeks. Given that our customers are not just using video for security, we receive tremendously differentiated feedback. By focusing on solving customers’ problems with video – whether the problem exists in loss prevention, operations, marketing or somewhere else in the organization –  we’re able to develop and deploy impactful solutions at a very fast pace.

With the clear benefits and innovations possible with SaaS, it’s no wonder we’ve seen a lot more companies taking a SaaS approach video. A word of caution: a lot of products in the marketplace today are marketed under the guise of being MVaaS or SaaS when they really are not; so customers are forced to buy model year products that quickly become outdated. Envysion’s MVaaS application, on the other hand, resides entirely in the cloud, and as a result we are able to constantly innovate and add new features to meet customer demand.  Envysion’s MVaaS solutions harness the scalability and accessibility of SaaS – our MVaaS does not restrict video access to only one location at a time or only enable users to access a sub-set of features via the web. On the contrary, the Envysion application enables a customer to view live and recorded video from any of their locations with corresponding business systems data in one easy-to-use window without having to download software.

We created the MVaaS model and continue to provide innovative MVaaS solutions because customers need to be able to rapidly and efficiently find and use the video that matters to them. In designing the next generation of Envysion, our goal was to build an application that new users could quickly begin using to drive operations and profitability improvements in their organizations, and we believe we have done just that. We’ve assessed and addressed overall usability to provide a more intuitive navigation, minimize mouse clicks and help increase the productivity of our customers.

More tomorrow on specifics of the next generation…

Got some very exciting news last week while presenting at the Red Herring 100 event in Hollywood, CA – Envysion won the Red Herring 100 North America award along with 99 other of the top private technology companies.

Envysion’s award was based on our leading innovation in bringing the SaaS model to an entirely new segment, creating the MVaaS market, and for driving material and measurable financial results for our customers.  You can read the official press release here.

This recognition is a great testament to the talented team at Envysion and the disruptive technology and services that we are delivering for a rapidly growing customer base.  It also serves as a strong validation for our customers and prospects that have embraced Envysion as a partner and MVaaS as a strategic management tool to bring video-based business intelligence to help improve their operations and profitability.  While I can’t honestly say that the traditional video market players and incumbents fully realize yet how disruptive MVaaS is to their markets, this award and the customer traction that we are gaining are clear evidence that customers and outside industry observers continue to get it.

My thanks go out to all the people at Envysion that have worked hard to get us to this point and to all of the early adopter customers that saw the initial promise and potential and have helped us to turn it into a reality.

The fun is just getting started!