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.

Refering back to my blog on SaaS being around for 114 years, Herman Hollerith didn’t get everything right.  According to IBM archives, Hollerith resisted new ideas for the operation of his machines and wasn’t working well with one of his best and original customers, the US government.

To quote the IBM archive of their employee publication “Think” from 1972:

About 1905, the U.S. Census Bureau gave him an ultimatum: improve the machines and cut the rentals (which each year about equaled his total manufacturing cost). To this Hollerith said, No. The Census Bureau said: Then we’ll make them ourselves and improve them ourselves. Which they did, using former Hollerith employees to run the operation.

A simple age old truth, you’ve got to listen to your customers.  The pace of change and the competition in today’s business makes this ever more important.  But technology still needed to be evolved to meet customers needs back in 1905.

Envysion recently introduced support for ACTi IP cameras.  In particular our customers are demanding a mid to low priced camera that offers megapixel resolution.

Our customers needed a reliable, high resolution camera option at the lowest possible price.  ACTi’s megapixel cameras supply good quality images that exceed our customer’s requirements.  Our customers also like the several flavors of dome cameras which ACTi offers in megapixel resolutions.

We liked the easy integration with ACTi’s software and the near ubiquitous Power over Ethernet support.   For software integration, all we really need is the RTSP protocol for video transmission and a simple web interface that we can create scripts to auto-provision from our Hybrid NVR’s.  We also received excellent support from their development team.

Thanks ACTi!

Over at IP Video Market Info John Honovich has a good discussion going regarding megapixel without IP.  The topic might also be labeled: “What’s the best way to retrofit an existing analog system for megapixel video?”

Currently megapixel requires IP cameras which can be a costly upgrade if you are all analog today.  IP is very different from an install perspective and requires new cabling and complex configuration of IP addresses, cameras and NVR’s.  Or does it?

IP cameras can be auto configured with a good vms system. we at Envysion implemented auto-discovery and configuration in less than 30 days for Axis IP cameras. Using zeroconf and a simple http api we can now do it in just a couple days and push the software update into production automatically.

Ethernet can run over coax (IEEE 10Base2 is based on rg58 (50ohm), but with tweaks can run on rg59 (75ohm). There are a number of products that do this now, but they are currently a bit clunky and perhap too expensive. But that can be fixed. Just need some IP cameras with an integrated Ethernet over rg59 interface to get the cost down and provide a clean install.

Remember those images where if you “defocus” your eyes just right you can see a 3D image jumping out at you on the page?  These “stereograms”

A new imaging chip from Stanford University uses a similar principle to capture an image which includes depth information.  It sounds like they are looking at digital photography, but one can also imagine this technology trickling it’s way into surveillance video.

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.

Envysion is having so much growth that we’ve recently had to expand our database capacity to store the ever higher volume of event data flowing in.  (We still store video and the video database at the remote site)

Adding database capacity isn’t such a big deal if one just goes out and buys some “big iron” servers, a big storage area network system and pays a huge license fee for the latest Oracle enterprise database software.  This is the traditional enterprise way to grow a “data warehouse”.  This is sometimes called “Scaling Up” and it is extremely expensive, often taking up the a huge slice of any IT organization’s budget whenever there is truly a large amount of data stored in databases.

Instead, Envysion is using cutting edge, cost savings methods to grow our hosted service.  By “Scaling Out” our data across multiple commodity market server hardware and using the MySQL database, we’ve been able to keep costs low, keep performance high and still grow big, like 100’s of millions or even billions of rows big.  This is the way of highly scaled and efficient web applications.

Why does this matter?  Simple!  The costs of a scale out is at least an order of magnitude lower than the big general purpose data warehouse solutions out there.

But doing a “scale out” isn’t so easy.  While a “scale-up” design utilizes a small number or even just one, single, ever larger growing (in both size and dollars!) database.  The scale-up design is somewhat simple from an application perspective.  Conversly, doing a “scale out” really requires that one know how your users want to see your data.  You also need to know your application and data well enough to distribute the data across many low cost servers.  In other words, there’s not yet just one simple way to “shard” out your data across many database servers.  (although many innovative companies such as codeFutures dbShards and Dataupia are working on this as we speak)

When I hear talk about the virtues of “Software Only” video systems, I kinda think, huh?  Since when is a camera made of software?  I think what is really being talked about are the virtues of a multi-vendor solution as opposed to a single vendor solution.

Multivendor network video systems are a great direction and the wave of the future because they deliver more value to the customer.  They give customers more options to put together solutions which better fit their needs and better prices

Today’s IP video solutions which promote “software only” are really saying, buy your choice of cameras (mix and match for your needs) and your choice of recording hardware (PC’s made by Dell, HP, etc..), and buy your software from us.  That’s a huge leap forward from the analog video surveillance market which has really only had competition on the camera front and locked in customers to buying recording hardware from the same suppliers as the software.

What seems to be taking some time however is the increased cost of the IP cameras is worth the benefits of a multivendor recording solution. It would be great if there were some open standards DVR’s out there, but alas, they don’t seem to exist.  If and when this happens, I can see a lot of value being created for customers as very cost effective DVR’s can be sold as part of a multivendor solution.  Imagine being able to buy whatever DVR suits your needs and cost requirements and being able to link that DVR with the advanced software platforms out there today, such as Milestone, OnSSI and of course, Envysion Video.

Having worked in telecom and enterprise networks for 15 years I strongly believe multivendor networks are often the right thing for the customer.  There are so many things a network needs to deliver that to deliver the “best of breed”, multiple vendors often have to be used.  Of course, there’s the healthy pricing competition that comes along with having more than one vendor bid a solution, and continue to bid upgrades and growth of that system going forward.  As a customer and builder of network solutions, it’s no fun to be locked into a single vendor’s solution.  Price is a huge concern here when the vendor knows how much it will cost the customer to switch vendors.

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.