Last week marked my 4th trip to one of the largest security conferences in the U.S., ISC West.  I’ve posted before about the evolution of my trips there and how I’m much more comfortable now wandering the vast sea of video and security providers than I was when I first got into this space.

We never exhibit at the show as it is way to big and doesn’t put us in front of the key decision makers in our target segments.  Having said that, we always go commando and wander the halls talking to potential technology partners and generally staying abreast of who’s doing what.  I spent a full day there last week doing just that.  My general takeaway was again that I think the industry is rather broadly and consistently missing the big picture.

ISC West is a great place for big and small providers alike to exhibit their wares, showing off their latest and greatest technologies.  The show floor is overwhelming with all of the video monitors, HD cameras, video analytics demos, and other cool technologies.  The majority of product announcements are around the latest version of someone’s DVR, their camera, their software or their storage capacity.  You can see the highest resolution megapixel cameras that are available, you can find someone with a crazy amount of storage, you can get a demo of some intriguing analytic capabilities or watch the same guy from last year build a video wall on the coolest touch screen projector you’ll ever see.  Lots and lots of new technology – bright and shiny things.

What you don’t see is the killer application, and this is where I think that the traditional video industry is missing the mark.  There are too many companies that view innovation only as finding the next bell and whistle for their product or making it see more detail, store more video, or do something else better than it did before.  This is important, I’m not suggesting that it isn’t valuable for the industry – there are a lot of applications that will benefit from some of the incremental and evolutionary changes that we see each year in the space.  The logic of these companies is that if they sell widgets and their widget “goes to 11″ when the competitor’s only goes to 10, they will sell more widgets than the competitor, which seems rational enough.

What they appear not to be focused on, however, is finding the killer application.  There’s a good definition of the killer app on wikipedia, which I’ll reference here as well:

“A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app), in the jargon of computer programmers and video gamers, has been used to refer to any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware like a gaming console, operating system or other software. A killer app can substantially increase sales of the platform on which it runs.”

Said differently, a killer app is something that creates so much value for customers that it can drive orders of magnitude more demand for the underlying platform on which it is running.  In our world, this would be an application that is so powerful that it actually increases the demand for video services and technologies (cameras, recorders, storage, etc.) rather than just competes for a share of the existing pie.

I’m sure that there are a tremendous number of companies that were at ISC West, were they to read this post, that would comment that this is exactly what they are trying to develop (or may already even claim to have developed).  I am certainly not in a position to judge whether a given company has or hasn’t done this, but I do have strong opinions on what you’d have to have done for this to be true.

I’ll post again tomorrow with my thoughts on what makes a killer application in the world of video surveillance.

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.

For almost a year, the team at Envysion has been striving to evangelize the unique benefits of applying SaaS technology to the video surveillance market.  An initial step in the process was coining a term for the market segment.  This is where MVaaS was born.

Initially there was little proof that the term was catching on.  But we persisted, established this blog, highlighted it in our press relations, described it to customers…

Then, slowly, we started seeing it here (a competitors website) and there (a hallmark industry on-line publication).  It was taking hold!  Now it is commonplace to find it mentioned prominently by those who are well-versed in the industry, and who may have an influence on decision-makers.  Jeff Gannon compiled examples of this in his recent post.

Here’s the presentation from which Jeff Gannon found the quote from Severin Sorensen, CEO of Sikyur, a security advisory firm.  The presentation was delivered at the ASIS International Workshop on Advanced CCTV in August 2008.  It is truly exciting to see the momentum building behind this technology!

The acronym MVaaS is meant to be a play off SaaS, where software is hosted and used via the Web.  When we coined the term MVaaS we wanted to convey that the video surveillance system is operated by a managed services provider.

A good comparison is a managed telecommunications provider operates corporate networks on behalf of their customers, with customer premise equipment as well as a hosted components like websites, email services and of course, the network backbone.

In addition to the network infrastructure, telecom providers also provide value added services like web hosting, and Voice over IP.  MVaaS is a lot like outsourcing your telephone system.  You could run your own telephone system in house, buy all the equipment and maintain it, or you can hire a company to do it for you, all the way from the phones on your desk to voicemail and so on.

MVaaS brings this same kind of managed service to Network Video systems.

There’s a “living” definition for MVaaS at wikipedia that you might check out.

The discussion around “Should You Use Software-Only Video Management Systems” at ipmarketvideo.info got me thinking about a feature we’ve been talking about over here at Envysion for a couple of years now, the “Downloadable NVR”.

A downloadable NVR appliance may offer a valuable mix of “software only” and appliance hardware.  Given the number of software appliances over at VMWare’s Appliance Marketplace, this is not a new idea, but perhaps one that just haven’t been done much with NVR’s/DVR’s.  Here’s one way this could be done:

- Go to a website

- Download the NVR software and burn onto a CD

- Put the CD into a PC and boot it up

- About five minutes later, the PC is now a dedicated NVR

- The NVR automatically appears in your Envysion Video Web application account

This has the value of reliability and easy of maintenance of embedded software, but without the specialized embedded hardware that locks you in to a hardware vendor.  Perhaps it’s also valuable due to the ease of obtaining the software.

What do you think?

Yesterday Matt Steinfort (Envysion CEO) held an all hands meeting in which – for the first time since we were a tiny company with a small office – the entire staff was in the same room (we can do this because we have the Envysion lounge thanks to the Cultural Committee but that’s fodder for a future post). The purpose of the meeting was to share with the entire company the strategy for the rest of this year and 2009.

I don’t need to tell you that the economy stinks right now and that times are tough all over.  Matt spoke about the prospects for our company which are very strong thanks to the hard work of the management team in general but especially Michael Wilson who was our Finance Director but is now our CFO – a very well deserved promotion. Michael is somewhat of a magician as it applies to finances and has ensured that we are in a terrific position financially regardless of the economy in the near term.

That said, Matt wasn’t painting a rosey picture. One of the key messages he delivered is that we need to be better at what we do and that we need to focus on doing only those things that support our customers and the business. This can be boiled down to doing what’s important vs. doing what’s urgent. This is an age old struggle that effects every business and it certainly has plagued us.

The concept is simple but the execution can be difficult. At the heart of the concept is the thesis that one can only accomplish so many things in a given time period. In today’s world the list of tasks to choose from is often overwhelming. In order to be most effective one should strive to do only those things that support one’s Wildly Important Goals – these tasks are the important ones – and ignore whenever possible those tasks that don’t.

There’s a great post about this at PickTheBrain called Important vs. Urgent: 5 ways to focus on what really matters.

In our case we know what our WIGs are because Matt oultined them for us. So in order to be effective we need to do only those tasks and participate only in those activities which support those goals.

I’ll be posting more about this in the future and I’d love to hear your thoughts and opinions on the topic.

I follow major league baseball only casually, so I’m no expert on the subject.  However, it is my understanding that a couple of teams (Cubs and Brewers) have just been eliminated from post-season play.

I mention this because one of my colleagues, Jeff Gannon, had a marvelously penned post from earlier this season about the Cubs’ fortunes.  Oh to be August and optimistic again. 

I actually stopped by Jeff’s desk to offer my condolences, but he failed to even show up to work.  Someone mentioned that he had a previously planned vacation, but I have my doubts.  Hang in there, Jeff.  There’s always next century.

As for me, I root for the Cincinnati Reds, so perhaps I should keep my mouth shut.  It has been some time (18 years, but who’s counting) since the Reds have won a world series championship.  Interestingly, the manager for that team - “Sweet” Lou Piniella.

Anyone who worked with large scale computer networks in the 80′s and even early 90′s probably observed some changes that are perhaps similar to what’s happening today with Network Video.

Back then it was data communications (net-heads) and telecommunications (bell-heads) which were converging.  In the late 90′s and early 00′ VoIP further converged telecom and datacom.  There was a significant cultural clash between the pony tails of startup companies such as Cisco, 3Com, Cabletron and Ascend versus incumbent giants like Nortel, Erricson and so on.   It was the net-heads vs. the bell-heads.

Now network video causing IT groups and security groups as well as incumbent vendor’s versus startups have to work together.

I look forward to a move from a security market that features vendor lock-in strategies and stovepipe solutions to one that has implicit interoperability.

Image by julie varnau via Flickr

You may have heard that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) just came online yesterday.  There are a bunch of nonsensical fears that the LHC could create a black hole that would destroy the Earth.

This reminded me of a great, stay up all night and read it book called “Earth”, by David Brin.   If you like Michael Crichton, you’ll probably love Earth.

When looking this up I noticed Mr. Brin also wrote a book called the “Transparent Society” in 1998.    In this fiction Brin explores how the massive amount of video surveillance in our society may result in something much different than the Orwellian nightmare of 1984.  Instead Brin proposes that rather than a sinister master agent of control, everyone will be watching each other.  Cameras would become a public resource that are used by everyone to make sure our children are playing safely in the park, there’s no boogeyman around the corner and that the watchers themselves will be watched preventing an abuse of power.

Think I’ll have to pick that one up.

John Honovich rated managed video as one of the top 3 emerging technologies in Video Surveillance for 2008.  We here at Envysion are flattered to be mentioned as the segment leader!

I think John has it right that it’s going to take several years before managed video is as big as the general IP video market is today.  J. C. R. Licklider wrote back in 1965: “A modern maxim says: People tend to overestimate what can be done in one year and to underestimate what can be done in five or ten years…”.  Bill Gates said something similar in the 90′s.  It’s not uncommon for even only incrementally new technologies to take 3-5 years to reach critical mass.

The speed of market acceptance and adoption of managed video will also take time.  Technology and bandwidth are not barriers, but only with the right mix of centralized and distributed software, storage and video streaming.  Envysion is doing it today.

However, operating a managed video system at scales of over a millon cameras is something that’s going to take considerable “know-how” that only comes from having “been there and done that” over years of learning.

Managed video may be plug-and-play at the edge, but scaling up all the systems necessary to keeping everything running well together is not plug-and-play.  Fortunately we’ve accomplished similar feats in the telecom space building the backbones of the Internet and voice over IP systems.

In 5 or 10 years, a million cameras will feel like just the start.  It’s crystal clear to me that there is enormous growth potential for managed video.