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?

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.

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)