While shows & conferences can vary a bit (content, location, reputation) they generally provide a decent barometer of market health as well as good anecdotal feedback. We just returned from FS-TEC (food service technology) in Long Beach. If the last three days is an indicator then I’d say the pulse of the market is ‘measured’. So what does that mean? Well in my view customers, vendors, partners were all cautious but willing to believe things are improving and willing to consider investing. It’s a good balance of understanding that while we (the economy) may not be all the way out of the woods the time may be ripe for consideration and investment to improve our lot.
So what was the direct feedback relevant to MVaaS and Envysion? First, our message on leveraging video to improve both the top and the bottom line resonated incredibly well with customers in this economy. I know, shouldn’t it always? Well we’ve certainly seen times when the marketplace was more than willing to embrace interesting technology for interesting technology’s sake, these are not those times. And that is a great thing for MVaaS & Envysion as we are all about profit improvement. A similar area that resonated particularly well was our willingness to demonstrate ROI (and do the math) for customers through a committed, prescribed pilot process. A second observation (and area of feedback) was that we are spending less time describing what managed video ‘is’ and ‘means’ to the market. And when we do describe it, customers & partners get it quickly. This is very good news as it indicates a growing awareness of the MVaaS model. While our work is certainly not done, we are benefitting both from a growing awareness of our video model as well as a strong SaaS brotherhood of companies like Salesforce.com bringing visibility to the as a service model. Of course this means we can move more quickly to the good stuff…value delivery, how we fit in with other solution components, and when we start!
For those interested in stopping by and seeing a demo, we will be at MURTEC March 10-12. Come by and check out MVaaS in action.

When I explain the value that Managed Video as a Service provides to customers I like to stay simple (ducks and bunnies) and describe it in two dimensions: ‘more of the same’ (similar value as legacy video solutions just more of it) & ‘new & distinct’ (value not currently realized in traditional environment). Today as I was reading Security Magazine’s Why It’s Time to Consider Managed Services I was struck at how well the traditional ‘oustourcing’ rationale applies to MVaaS. It also provided a bit of déjà vu as I spent a fair bit of time in management consulting advising clients on the strategic benefits of focusing on their core business.  So I thought I’d focus on a couple relevant MVaaS outsourcing benefits.  Here are two areas worthy of conversation:  

Immediate access to scale & expertise. In the traditional path a customer can invest all the upfront time, capital, and resources to select, deploy, and manage, grow and eventually upgrade a video system. If the customer is small to mid-sized (sub-scale) the best systems may not make economic sense. With an ‘outsourced’ MVaaS solution a customer can gets immediate turn-key solution that is more robust as they access the service providers scale as well as access to the continuous improvements delivered by the ‘as a service model’. All for an easy to digest monthly charge.  Sure you can develop all of your own from scratch over time (developing exception reporting for example) or you can let an expert accelerate the learning curve and provide an immediate head start. Speed to results.

For customers that have scale, outsourcing typically represents value through opportunity cost, or opportunity gain depending how you are looking at it. This one is best conveyed at 10,000 feet, and simply asks – what business are you in? Ok, would you like to spend more of your time and resource on that business or in the management and administration of your video system? Where do you think you will get better returns on your invested hour or dollar? The difference in the return for each is the opportunity cost. This value can be unlocked by letting an expert do the ‘non-core’ activities.

Net-Net while other areas of our proposition may deliver more, for some customers this qualifies as ‘new and distinct’ value worth talking about.

Hello to the Managed Video as a Service community. I’m Carlos Perez and I recently joined Envysion to lead our Product and Marketing efforts. I am excited to join the great team here at Envysion and look forward to bringing our innovative managed video as a service solution and story to the marketplace.

I thought I’d kick-off my participation in the MVaaS blog with some thoughts on a subject that is now very near and dear to my heart – adoption of Managed Video. For any given innovation, much like prognostication on the stock market, we all see and hear differing perspectives from analysts and solution providers on what any given year holds. Already we have dueling perspectives for Managed video in 2010. Will it be a ‘breakout’ year (IMS)? Or will adoption be ‘gradual’ (Honovich)?

For me a useful reference point in thinking through the pace of adoption with a product & marketing lens is with our old friend Geoffory Moore and his ‘Crossing the Chasm’ take on the adoption curve. I won’t waste time here with a synopsis of the book, instead I’ll cherry pick out a few key challenges Moore might identify if he were to examine Managed Video adoption. In doing so I’m suggesting that Managed Video as a Service currently sits with ‘early adopters’ in Moore’s model.

So putting aside investment (agree that $ is a factor) and presuming that core technical aspects of managed video are sound, where would Moore point to as key areas that will determine if adoption will be rapid or more gradual, in particular with the pragmatic ‘Early Majority’? My take (admittedly early days) is Moore would point to three key areas:

1. Value delivery and value clarity. Sounds easy right? Execution is harder. Pragmatists in the early majority are black and white and want to see the numbers. They are about the solution, not sexy technology that makes them look cool. The first challenge for managed video is to deliver substantially more value vs. what customer have today. ‘More value’ here can translate in a couple ways, more from traditional sources (such as security & loss prevention) or more from new value sources (marketing effectiveness driving increased revenue). Both of course need to translate directly to the bottom line. Critically, value must be succinctly and effectively communicated to the customer in terms that resonate.
2. Total customer solutions. Proven 100% easy. The Early Majority customers don’t want to ‘work with you’ they want you to make their lives easier. They need soup to nuts, turn-key solutions that are well thought through and apply to their specific needs (be they industry specific or functional needs). For managed video this translates to presenting solutions that contemplate all elements of the system from install to management and future growth. That provide an easy path to acquire hardware, to scale, administer, and of course a system that is accessible, intuitive, and easy of use and. Further, customers in this next stage typically want proven solutions with references from other customers in the same boat. Anchor customers are important.
3. Understanding & coexistence with existing infrastructure/ecosystem. The Early Majority are aware of existing investment and functionality of existing products. These customers respect the relationships they have with existing vendors and the interconnection of any system with other data & adjacent systems. Its not that these can’t be overcome, they just can’t be ignored if you are going to accelerate adoption. While clearly overcoming switching costs is a part of the story, adjacent systems and data are also a tremendous enabler for Managed Video. The better understood the adjacent systems and data, the better those elements can be integrated with video to drive insight and value. POS systems and data is an obvious example, as video integrated to POS can create exponential insight and value to the customer vs. either alone.

I’m not suggesting this is rocket science or that this list is all inclusive. But these are some of the real challenges that will determine the pace of adoption. Of course I’ve voted with my feet and believe that here at Envysion we are taking these challenges head on and are well positioned to drive acceleration. Of course there is a lot of hard work (and fun!) ahead to make that happen.

I’m interested to hear other perspectives and in the future I’ll circle back with more of the Envysion view on overcoming these hurdles, our progress, as well as the new things that we find along the way!

John Honovich, on his IPVideoMarket.info blog, posted an interesting article on ease of use or user interface design and how it applies to products typically found in the video management space.

I found his article http://ipvideomarket.info/report/easy_to_use_video_management_software a very compelling read and wanted to compare some of his findings to our experience here at Envysion.

His first and most important point is “Training = Failure” – I couldn’t agree more. Our goal at Envysion is to build software that does not require any training to use. Our goal is that with at most a 5-10 minute demo, most users should be able to navigate the software, search for recorded video with data, and share that video with others. Based on customer feedback to date, we seem to be generally reaching that goal.

John also raises a very interesting point about the type of person and their skill sets for whom the video application is designed. My general sense, especially when walking the floors of a conference such as ASIS, is that nearly all vendors design their system for the security professional, who is typically located in a video room with a wall of monitors. Their user interfaces are focused around cramming as many features into a single screen as possible. How else, for example, might you come up with the idea to display 48 thumbnail sized live video channels on a single screen? These professionals may represent perhaps less than 1% of the total population of a company that has video cameras in use.

At Envysion, on the other hand, we design our application for the other 99% of the population of the company. This includes marketing, sales, IT, operations, management, human resources, and so on. To be successful in this, we constantly have to balance complexity and features with ease of use and simplicity.

Use of icons, as John points out, is a great example of this balance. With Envysion, we used to use a number of icons for functions such as “edit user” or “remove user”; based on customer feed back we have found it much more effective to use simple words such as “edit” or “delete”. As a result, we’ve removed many of these icons and replaced them with text.

Another challenge that we face, especially with a web-based application, is consistency of style. Just because you may have hundreds colors doesn’t mean that you should use them all. We have found it important to be very consistent with respect to fonts, colors and general style-sheet items. A great example of this is the design of buttons. We have found it very helpful to insure that buttons have an identical look and feel. In addition, our users appreciate that fact that the most commonly pressed button in a specific situation (e.g., the “OK” button in a search dialog”) is highlighted to stand out. You’ll find this technique used in many web sites today. (Hint: look for the shape and size of  the “purchase” or “buy” button on any commerce web site).

This same approach applies to links within a page. Users always appreciate common indicators that a link exists – e.g., the link is always a specific color and has the same behavior when you hover over it. Wikipedia is a good example of this behavior.

For those of you who are curious about our application, I’ve posted a short demonstration of our application below.

Enjoy

We’ve long been advocates of the merits of Software as a Service (SaaS) and have always said that we believe there is tremendous potential for this model to disrupt the traditional video surveillance business.  Despite our firm belief in this, other providers in the market have been slow to pursue this model and continue to pursue the traditional hardware or enterprise software models.  While on one hand this is good for us from a competitive standpoint, it leaves the burden of educating the market on the benefits to a small group of companies, of which we are one.

With that as a back drop I was pleasantly surprised to see an article in Today’s System’s Integrator about the merits of SaaS.  I’ll forgive the author for saying SaaS is Security as a Service as the overall article was a reasonable overview of the concepts aimed at an audience that hasn’t spent a lot of time thinking about it.

It’s great to see this becoming part of the dialog in the industry beyond what we’ve been contributing.

Computers use a lot of power.  A typical home PC might use between $5-$10 a month in power if left on 24×7 without any power savings functions turned on.  Video recording systems based on PC’s which are encoding video and constantly writing that to hard drives puts a heavy load on computers and normally  defeats any power saving capabilities they have.   Multiply this times hundreds or thousands of video recorders and the cost for power starts to add up to tens of thousands of dollars a year.

As part of some development we’ve done to implement the Envysion EnVR software on low power embedded type systems coupled with IP cameras I wondered what the cost savings in power might be versus more power hungry PC based platforms.  So I compared the embedded platform to a configuring using our standard video recorder system which runs on PC based hardware and utilizes software compression with analog capture and analog cameras.

Doing this we’ve found the embedded system running the same EnVR software reduces power consumption by about 70% on up to 8 camera systems.  However, power still really isn’t currently all that expensive at a US national average somewhere around $0.11 per kilowatt hour.  So even with this big power reduction it didn’t make sense to go beyond 8 cameras due to the increased cost of the IP cameras versus analog cameras.

Even at 6-8 cameras, the cost savings in power consumption takes  3+ years to payback versus the lower cost analog cameras.  With more than 8 cameras, it quickly takes some much longer to achieve any cost savings that the time exceeds a reasonable life expectancy of the video recorder system (Assuming a range of 3-5 years for the hard drive and cooling fans in the recording system).

Half of the physics prize will be shared by two researchers from Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. While at Bell Labs, Willard Boyle and George Smith invented the charge-coupled device, or CCD, which takes the place of conventional film in many of today’s digital cameras.

The CCD also powers a lot of surveillance cameras and was invented in 1969.  They were working on a video phone.  My my, how time files and still no video phones! 

Yesterday I left readers dangling with a “things are looking better, but…” ending. So with commodity costs down, sales down to flat, but profitability starting to tick upwards, why wouldn’t a small business owner want to draw a paycheck? Perhaps the first paycheck in over a year?

Earlier this month, a coalition led by the USDA and the US Senate took actions that resulted in a “Dairy Bailout.” That’s right – a bailout of the American dairy industry. Since dairy prices have sank to 30 year lows, many dairy producers were pricing below operating cost. The government has stepped in to purposely bid higher than market and remove excess inventory, nearly a $350 million price tag to taxpayers. The result? The price of cheese has skyrocketed 25% and is expected to hit 40% by year’s end.

Market forces of our great economy at work? Doesn’t sound like it. When the price of cheese was 2x their current levels in 2008 and pizzerias were bleeding red, was there an equivalent support model? No, and it really never crossed their minds back then. However, I can guarantee small business owners are seeing red having their tax dollars go towards a program that is systematically eroding the profitability that has been so elusive over the past 18 months.

So what does all of this have to do with MVaaS? It comes down to maximizing profitability. While we can’t control the surprising dealings on Capitol Hill that raid the bottom line, we can control the exceptions, variance and negative behaviors at the store level and across the enterprise. MVaaS will help you and your business keep a few more cents for every dollar that goes in the register.

Over the past year I’ve tracked the roller coaster trends in commodity food costs that affect the restaurant industry. It started in late 2007 with the “corn bubble” where over zealous farmers were chasing the ethanol craze, creating a ripple effect on the world food supply. The resulting food cost escalation squeezed restaurant profitability and forced many to shutter their eateries for good.

In early 2009 it appeared the bubble had burst and the sky-high costs of proteins, wheat and dairy came crashing down. As is typical with this economic condition, high prices led to over supply and now dairy prices have plummeted to 30 year lows. This is great news for restaurants and specifically, pizzerias, who consume 25% of  cheese in the US. While consumer spending continues to apply pressure to top line growth, there has been some commodity cost relief following an awful 2008.

Yep, the market forces of our great economy are at work. We can expect that lower production will offset any market oversupply to naturally stabilize prices. It may take some time and the overflowing coffers of the suppliers from the record high prices of 2008 may suffer a bit. On the flip side, the wholesale consumers get to enjoy a little extra profit that had all but vanished during the same period.

Just when you thought it was safe to draw a paycheck from your small business…

Despite the challenging economy (and perhaps b/c of it), Envysion’s MVaaS solution continues to drive material value and resonate with large multi-unit operators.  We are seeing more demand in the retail and restaurant space now than we ever have.  We’re well ahead of our 2009 plan and have some very material opportunities for 3Q09.

As a result, we’re stepping on the gas to take advantage of the opportunity we have.  If you are interested in joining a rapidly growing startup that is disrupting a large traditional marketplace with a differentiated and compelling solution, shoot your resume to jobs@envysion.com

All jobs (except Sales) are in Louisville, CO – which happens to be CNN Money’s #1 Best Small Town in America.  Here are some of the areas we are looking to augment:

• Product Management (SaaS, software product management)
• Customer Implementation (to manage customers through pilots and early rollouts)
• Customer Service (need basic technical skills, Linux knowledge)
• Sales (strong enterprise solution selling capabilities)
• Procurement/Inventory Management
• Web development (PHP, Java, Linux, Apache, MySQL)