The feedback was overwhelmingly positive on the content, mix of attendees, and dialogue driven by the sold out event.   The energy and excitement throughout the summit and the social events was evident and invigorating for everyone.   Now it is on all of us to maintain and seize the momentum that was created. 

So what’s next?  Given unanimous support for a recurring Summit, we’ll take feedback and circle back on dates for the next Summit.   And in addition to this blog we will also build some other vehicles for all of us to continue to build the managed and hosted video community.

More to come shortly…

Call me crazy but it would seem that a great opportunity to innovate and perhaps de-risk some of the margin challenges presented by growing dollar menus is Managed Video. Managed Video as a Service targets operations and profit improvement and provides a rapid payback with no strain on IT and little to no overhead. We’ve delivered with a large (and growing) set of customers and can provide historical proof and pilot demonstration for new customers of 10-15% profit improvement.  Matter of fact just today we ran the numbers for a customer who is adopting our solution and predictably the results came in at 10%+ profit improvement. While I’d argue 10% profit improvement and under six month payback is always a good answer it seems to be even better when combined with the current dollar menu craze.  A one, two punch of innovation to drive revenue and sustain margin.

You had me at hello!

First, let me start with the clear declaration that I am 100% in favor of companies gathering as much competitive information as possible.  Any good company should have a strong understanding of who is its competition, how they are differentiated, and what should the company be doing to win in the marketplace.  Also, having spent a bunch of time at Bain & Company I am very familiar with the full range of approaches that companies and 3rd parties can use to legally and ethically gather competitive information.

While there are clearly defined legal guidelines, there aren’t as universally accepted ethical guidelines.  We’ve been to a couple of trade shows recently that have provided some great examples that clearly fall on the wrong end of whatever line you draw.

Example #1: If you want to see my marketing material, just ask.  We publish a lot of our material on the web and we are also willing to share it with anyone that stops by our booth to say hello.  Just don’t sneak by when the booth is not even open and pick through our stuff to “borrow” some of it.  If you aren’t willing to ask for it, you probably don’t think you should have it.

Example #2: Don’t pretend to be someone else.  I’ve had folks stop by and introduce themselves as working for one company when I find out later that they are directly working for another, competitive company.  I often stop by other folks booths during shows to see what they are up to and how they are representing themselves.  I wear my badge (with my name and company on it), I introduce myself, and I have a conversation.

Example #3: I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.  Anyone that has talked with me will know that I tend to be very open and share a lot about our business and what is going on in the market (this blog is just one of the channels we use for that open communication)  I enjoy talking with other players in the market and will share a lot of high level information with folks – my only request is that the information sharing is reciprocated.  Don’t pepper us with a bunch of very detailed questions and then say “I’m not allowed to tell you anything” when we ask you the same questions in return.

No real point in this post as “people are who they are” and will behave accordingly, just thought I would offer some suggestions to anyone out there with a competing solution that wants to better understand what we are doing.

To celebrate our respective moves into new headquarters Envysion and Zayo are hosting an open house on Thursday, May 20 from 3:30 – 6:30pm.

We’ll have demo’s of the Envysion application, tours of our new facility and we’ll even have Louisville’s Mayor Sisk on hand for a ribbon cutting at 4:30.

There will be refreshments and hors d’œuvres served. Your family is welcome.

So if you happen to be in Colorado on Thursday the 20th, swing by. Hopefully we’ll see you there

A killer application is one that drives a material increase in demand for the underlying platform on which the application is based. The key phrase in there is “material increase in demand”. This is very different than an application that drives a material increase in a company’s market share – it requires that the app increase the size of the pie for the platform.

I would argue that the majority of innovation in video these days does not meet this definition. The majority of innovation that I see is focused on increasing the share the innovator has of the current market.

As an example take megapixel cameras – this is a great innovation and it will certainly lead over time to megapixel camera providers taking share from lower resolution analog and IP cameras. However, does it increase the fundamental demand for cameras or video? It is not clear to me that it does. Businesses that used to buy lower quality cameras will now buy higher quality cameras. Maybe the revenue per camera goes up, but this will be offset by potentially lower camera counts as users cover areas with fewer, but higher quality cameras.

As another example take DVR and VMS innovations. There are ample examples of DVRs and video management systems that continue to improve, adding new bells and whistles and continually driving down the price/performance curve. With these new capabilities existing security and loss prevention folks can be more effective at what they have been doing for the last couple of decades. All of this is great for the industry and great for the vendors as they compete for share, but I’ve seen very little of it that will fundamentally increase the underlying demand for video.

The solutions with “killer app” potential in the video world are those that create demand for video in people or businesses that aren’t using video today or that cause existing users of video to require an order of magnitude more video than they use today.

Given the high bar in this definition – increasing the size of the overall market – only time, and not a marketing guy or company exec, will tell us whether there were any “killer apps” at ISC West last month, but I sure don’t think I saw one.

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.

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!

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