Why is Fall the start of so many things? As if this time of year isn’t busy enough with the start of school, extra-curricular sports and activities, when you add the season premieres of various tv shows, it’s a recipe for sleep deprivation. This Fall has been particularly busy. I’m ordinarily not much of a tv-watcher. I have a handful of favorite shows, and I rely heavily on our DVR to store them until I have time to watch. Lately, however, it’s been hard to keep up. First it was the Summer Olympics, then the Democratic and Republican conventions, and now it’s the season-openers of all of the tv series. It also happens that our tv provider “upgraded” our service to an integrated High Definition DVR. The problem is that the storage capacity of this DVR is severely limited by the amount of bandwidth that HD shows consume. Before I have a chance to watch a show I’ve stored, it gets dumped off to record another. Not much of an upgrade, actually.

I think it would make more sense if the season premieres took place during another time of year, like January, when the post-holiday doldrums hit and when the weather makes it more likely you’ll be spending time indoors watching tv. After all, isn’t January the true start of the year?

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.

I recently met with an outsourced call center executive, with more than 78 call centers distributed around the globe.  They employ more than 70,000 people and have a highly distributed environment.  One of the biggest challenges in convincing a company to outsource their customer care, sales and technical support is to provide a level of control and comfort that the operation will run as efficiently as the in-house work and that the quality of the agents will equal that of the current call center.

Outsourcers provide detailed reports outlining performance and allow them to listen to calls, but for many companies who outsource, seeing is believing.

Below are my top 10 reasons video, and especially MVaaS, is a great fit in the call center world:

1) Call centers tend to be distributed and the geographical challenges of getting to them makes inspecting what is going on very difficult. Many are distributed around the world which makes travel expensive, difficult and time consuming.
2) Basic security - most have basic video, but only at exits, in parking lots, etc…  There is a huge issue with theft, especially with stealing of supplies, hardware in customer labs, pc’s, printers, and others.

3) Call centers have plenty of bandwidth to allow remote viewing.
4) Video can be used to check on policy adherence and to ensure that managers are with the teams, not locked in their offices. For example, call center agents are not supposed to have cell phones or writing info on their desks due to taking credit cards. There are big fraud issue with these types of transactions. Smoking policy adherence, shredding of docs, cleanliness and other policies can be checked as well.
5) By adding Audio to training rooms with video, remote call center management and HR can inspect training procedure effectiveness and employee engagement.
6) Outsourcers can give “control” which is the biggest concern of outsourcing, to the clients, to look into the centers where they have their work done to check status.

7) Integration with access control systems to ensure only employees who are supposed to be there.
Call centers across the globe can share documented best practices.
9) Many call centers have cafes and will have some POS system, so looking for anomalies and exceptions can reduce shrinkage.
10) There are a lot of shenanigans in call centers. Drugs, employee misconduct, and many other issues arise, espeically with the density of people in a call center.  The employees tend to be younger (especially overseas), paid between 2 and 10 dollars per hour, and are not mature professionals.

What does open architecture mean? Who cares what it means?

An interesting discussion regarding single vendor solutions or “packages” over at ipMarketVideo and Matt Marshall’s SecurityCaffeine made me think about this a bit.

The single biggest reason I can see a customer wanting an open architecture is because they don’t want to be locked into a single vendor.  This could be based on price.  In large networks one might want multiple suppliers to have them compete against each other for business.  However, perhaps more important is no one vendor can supply the capabilities the customer needs.  Often there are several pieces available that could help the customer, but they are not available in a package that works together.  In separate parts, the dramatically reducing the value to the customer.

A good example is retail loss prevention analytics and video integration that Matt and Rob are talking about.  There are some very nice, highly sophisticated solutions provided by some point of sale vendors.  But few point of sale vendors also have a video surveillance system.

Thinking back to the set of “data deluge” posts I made a few months back, video’s value is significantly increased if one can interface with an information feed that tells one when to look at the video.  It’s really the ONLY way to scale beyond having people sit in front of 9-12 monitors 24×7.

Yesterday, I wrote about exception reporting. Recently we received two requests for exception reports in the same day. Here are two examples:

I am such a geek. To prove it to our sales folks, I used the following “tripartite motto” for the development of Envysion’s products: Easy, Enamor, Stun.

Okay, so I am not a great wordsmith.  At least it kept our sales folks interested, or at least laughing, for a few minutes.  While the terms are tongue in cheek this motto is perhaps the most important theme for all our product development.

Easy - Everything we build has to be EASY to use. REALLY easy. So easy the store manager for a fast food place and use the application without a user manual.

Enamor - Our customers should LOVE using our application. Customers love it because it does the job, and it works every time they use it. And all importantly in today’s complex world, customers don’t have to mess with it anymore than is necessary to do their job.

Stun - Envysion will stun the marketplace with how huge it can scale. Petabytes of storage, 10’s of thousands of remote locations and users: No problem!

These are the attributes we want our technology to have and that we must constantly strive for.  After all, customer’s requirements change over time.  Technology changes over time as well.  Software as a service solutions like Envysion Video are uniquely positioned to continually meet customer requirements to deliver increased productivity, reduced cost and ever larger scale.

I  received two requests for exception reporting linked to video last week. One from a prospective customer who is in trials with Envysion and one in the form of an RFP. Both came from loss prevention staff. Both are interested in using Envysion’s video and reporting functions for LP activities.

It is interesting how these two LP staffs have such similar LP exception reporting requirements, even though they come from different aspects of retail (hard goods vs. restaurant).

I’ll share some of the requirements tomorrow, but for today, I’d like to explore the best way to provide exception reporting. One approach is the all-in-one application. That is, find one application (MVaaS or not) that can provide exception reporting, video management, alerting, trending, and everything else. The advantage of course is that the user has one (presumably well designed) user interface to use. However, the downside is you may not get best of breed. In fact, there may be significant shortcomings in both reporting and video management when bought as one package.

On the other hand, the best-in-breed approach allows one to purchase two separate applications, both excellent in their own right. The challenge comes from how to integrate them together. MVaaS can play a very big role in the latter case as well.

More to come on how you might integrate MVaaS and an exception reporting system!

Back when I was a consultant - feels like a hundred years ago now - there was a movement towards what Jack Stark called Open Book Management. This was popularized in a book of the same name by John Case back in the mid 90’s. Below is a picture from today’s all-hands meeting in which our CEO Matt Steinfort is demonstrating our weekly version of open book management. The purpose of this weekly all-hands meeting is to keep everyone informed about the goings on at Envysion. Specifically we all learn where the company is at from a sales funnel, installation, development and operations perspective.

Matt Steinfort addresses Envysion

I think this type of exchange is critical in any company but especially a start-up. I admit to a bit of bias here since I do daily scrums with my development group but I can tell you from much past experience that frequent, open and consistent messaging to employees goes a long way towards building a cohesive organization. Additionally, when everyone has all the information it’s much more likely that they’ll make the right decision.

You can’t see it in this picture but there’s a video camera on the table there by Matt. We use it along with a conference bridge to make remote folks feel like they are in the room with us as well. In this way we’re eating our own dog food so to speak.

I’m curious to know if there are other opinions about open book or the use of MVaaS for meetings like this.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Ever heard of the airport security program called “CLEAR“? Clear’s customers give out personal identifying information to Clear to help expedite the security check process at airports.

CBS5 news in SanFrancisco reported a laptop containing some information of 33,000 applicants to the CLEAR program was likely stolen for more than a week and then returned. The laptop contained applicants’ birth dates and in some cases, driver’s license, passport or green card numbers. It did not contain Social Security numbers, credit card numbers or fingerprint or iris images used to verify identities at the checkpoints, the company said.

Clear was forced to shutdown enrollment of new members (but not their operating service) by the TSA until Clear implemented encryption on all it’s computers.

Encryption like this is particularly important on mobile devices where physical security is much more of a problem. Several software products now exist to make it much easier to encrypt all the data on your laptop computer. Jed Salazar, a technician at Envysion recommends Bit locker for Windows Vista, TrueCrypt for Windows XP and File Vault for Apple OS-X. Thanks for the links Jed.

There’s not much out there for mobile phones that I know of. If you access email on your mobile phone, you owe it to yourself to at least configure a password or PIN to make it harder for the casual thief from plundering any private data you might keep on your phone.

In the US it might still be a few years before one can make payments using our phone like a credit card.  But when we do you’ll definitely want some protection.