As I mentioned last Saturday in a post, I spent the first part of this week in Atlanta at ASIS – one of the two really large security shows each year, the other being the ISC shows (there are two of them, East and West).  The thing that I like about the ASIS conference is that it tends to have a lot more end users there whereas ISC tends to be a show more attended by integrators than real end customers.

I’ll give a full account of my trip in tomorrow’s post, but I thought I’d give a quick example of another MVaaS differentiator that was highlighted in one of my conversations with a customer prospect of ours.  The customer has ~1,500 locations, all corporate owned and managed.  The nature of their business (they are in retail) is that they do only a handful of transactions in a day (average is 10-15 per store per day).  I was talking to one of their regional directors of loss prevention about their biggest pain points and discovered that the single most important issue that this person was dealing with was false contracts.  The problem that they had was that some portion of the 15 transactions per day were complete fiction, either done by an employee or someone with familiarity with how this company does business.  The challenge that the LP director faced was that they were not usually able to identify these suspected false transactions until several months after the event occurred.  At that point there was almost no chance that they could use video to help them in any way in the investigation as they only keep 30-45 days of video on their traditional DVRs.

Here’s where an MVaaS solution can help in ways that a traditional DVR solution can’t.  Given the hosted nature of an MVaaS solution, customers can save their video not just to a file on their laptop, but they can also save video into a secure data center where it will persist as long as they want it to.  It can be more easily shared with lots of people; it can be categorized, annotated and tracked in a case management context; and it can be archived for future investigative purposes.  All of this can be done without any need for the company’s IT group to do anything – no need to set up and manage central storage capabilities, no need to touch any individual DVR, no need to worry about file management or anything related to the hundreds or thousands of video clips that a company may be interested in centrally archiving and sharing over the course of the year.

In the case of this customer, the application of this capability is pretty straight-forward.  Customer only has 15 transactions a day, which is really not that many in the retail world.  They can set up a rule once that is immediately applied to all of their 1,500 locations where the 5 minutes associated with every single transaction is automatically stored off of their in-store recorders and into the network.  With that simple step they have just enabled their company to investigate any single transaction that occurs in their business as far back as they would like and they never even had to mention the project to IT.  If they decided they didn’t need every single transaction (if instead of 15 transactions, you had 1500 you might want to be a little more precise in your criteria for archiving) they could simply change the archiving rule and narrow down the amount of transactions that get stored centrally.

Saving video off-premise is definitely something that can be done by traditional video systems, but even those that are more enterprise software platforms (not SaaS and definitely not MVaaS) require a large amount of IT involvement to pull off what I described above.  From the customers standpoint (both user and IT) everything I described above can be set up and implemented by a single user sitting in a Starbucks sipping a latte.  Pretty cool stuff.

Yesterday I blogged about sharing video from a web camera. Today, I’d like to talk about sharing video from surveillance cameras. What is typical state-of-the-art today? The answer is not very sophisticated. A user typically would need to travel to be physically next to the DVR. Then they would use the user interface to burn a CD-ROM or a DVD. Finally, they would hand carry or mail the disc to its intended recipient.

Now, this is actually a pretty efficient way to transport data. I like to remind my collegues that you should never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 loaded with Magtape. Although, in this day and age, the analogy really is “loaded with DVD-R discs”. If you’re curious, a 747-400 could hold approximately 2.5 Petabytes of data, and assuming a flight time from DEN to SFO of two and a half hours, would represent a bandwidth of approximately 1 Terabit per second. That’s damm big, even by today’s Internet standards. Thats’s some Sneakernet! But I digress.
It would be really neat if you could share your video with, lets say the Police, in the following way. Save the clip in question into your MVaaS provider’s cloud. Create a group called “Police Video“. Invite your local law enforcement officer to join the group as a guest and voila, they can view the video.

Gosh, maybe there’s even an MVaaS company who has built that feature already.

That sure beats sneakernet!

Here is yet another photo sharing site whose innovation is around the layout of photos, allowing you to share them in books ala scrap-book style. Its interesting to see there is still innovation (you be the judge of good or bad) in this area. Which brings me to ask, how to you typically share video?

Well, the answer to that question is quite different if you mean video from your web cam or video from your managed video system. In the web cam case, you can share the video through one of about hundred sites or you can upload the video to your favorite social networking site. Take facebook, for example, you can upload the video to a facebook group, invite your friends to access the group, and easily share the video online.

Now, what if you want to share video from a fixed surveillance camera with a few people. What are your choices, and what does that have to do with facebook?

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.

Welcome to the newest member of the MVaaS community, www.gotomycamera.com. This service, which has been launched by Eptascape, is entirely web hosted and provides storage of IP camera originated video. A user can log in from anywhere on the Internet and access their video.

The system is using Amazon’s cloud storage, so they should be able to scale to very large amounts of storage.

This points out an interesting benefit of MVaaS: virutally unlimited computing resources. In any typical non-MVaaS (as in enterprise hosted) system, the compute resources available to apply to video processing are relatively fixed. You have to buy more hardware if you need it.

Using an MVaaS approach, where the compute resources are in the cloud, you have access to an essentially unlimited platform for computing. It’s interesting that Eptascape has an analyitics product — seems like a great combination to take advantage of cloud computing.

We recently underwent a re-engineering of our Internet facing infrastructure to increase resilience and redundancy. We utilized a boutique network consulting firm that has designed the infrastructure of such giants as facebook and myspace.

Our Internet facing infrastructure is pretty standard: redundant firewalls, load balancers, and network switches. With this new network design, we can undergo multiple failures (for example one firewall, a load balancer and a network switch) without dropping, in most cases, a single packet.

This is really neat stuff which I won’t dive into. The interesting point is that since the infrastructure is so redundant, we now need to work extra hard to realize that a componant has failed. When the entire set of network devices are so self-healing, it is actually pretty hard to determine that one has failed. What an unexpected problem for an MVaaS provider!

As the Brits would say, “touch wood“.

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?

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: