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.

My last posts MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video Compared and Managed Video as a Service Explained, introduced the difference between MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video as well as the common benefits they both provide. This is the fifth of 5 posts in a series about the differences. (The previous were MVaaS Total Cost of Ownership, Managing Video Software, MVaaS Network Complexity, Why would I share video outside my enterprise)

This final post is about disaster recovery. The general gist of this post is “do it yourself” versus “trust someone else”. In its simplest form, disaster planning is about backing up your data and systems in a robust fashion. By robust, I mean

• Back up data and systems somehow (either to a tape system or a separate disk system)
• Move backups off-site on a regular basis
• Use a highly available system that can survive single points of failure, preferably with geographic redundancy

The basic differentiator between enterprise hosted and MVaaS in this area is who does the work. Disaster recovery is a complex project that requires careful planning, attention to detail, and regular practice. A company who employees enterprise hosted video clearly can control their own destiny in this area. They can know their DR planning and processes 100%. Of course, this implies a fair amount of work and cost on the part of the enterprise IT staff.

The flip side is that with MVaaS, you can rely on the service provider to do this work for you. The service provider has the motivation and responsibility to support this for multiple customers, so it should be done well. The service provider also is more likely to invest in highly available systems such as redundant disk arrays, multiple power supplies, redundant network connections and the like.

However, at the end of the day, it comes down to do you trust your service provider to do the right thing compared to how likely you trust yourself to do the right thing.

The restaurant vertical is one of the bread and butter verticals for Envysion.  New concepts are popping up all over.  Attached are some growing chains to watch, where new takes on established brands are gaining traction.  Most I have not seen, but would venture to guess many will gain traction in the short term, while others will stumble and fall.  Who will the winners be, love to hear from those who know these brands well.

It is great to see Maid-Rite on this list, my only alternative for “fast food” growing up in Grinnell, Iowa.  It shows that even an established brand can re-invent itself and grow.  Oh yeah, they have deployed MVaaS, coincidence?

http://www.monkeydish.com/2008062324845/searchable/the-future-50-2008.html

My last posts MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video Compared and Managed Video as a Service Explained, introduced the difference between MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video as well as the common benefits they both provide. This is the fourth of 5 posts in a series about the differences. (The previous were MVaaS Total Cost of Ownership, Managing Video Software, MVaaS Network Complexity)

The fourth difference between MVaaS and enterprise hosted video is related to sharing and collaboration beyond the enterprise. Let’s look at how this is accomplished. In a typical enterprise hosted solution, direct access to the application is provided over the VPN only. (See MVaaS Network Complexity for more information about that). For security reasons, access to the VPN is generally restricted to employees of the enterprise itself. Thus, if you want to share video outside of the enterprise, you generally have to burn it to a CDROM and physically transport it to others. (It would be difficult or impossible to email the video, as it is too large for most email transport systems).

With an MVaaS system, sharing outside the enterprise can be accomplished naturally. That is, typical MVaaS systems have sharing mechanisms built into the software. This means that video can be shared using mechanisms analogous to sending a link to a youtube video or adding a clip to a facebook group.

Ok, why would I ever want to share my video outside my enterprise?

One reason is simple: sharing a clip with the police or local law enforcement. You have probably had to do this already. However, if the law enforcement example doesn’t convince you, then think of the many new ways that you might want to share video:

• Allow a restaurant franchisee in another territory with which you collaborate to view your video to share best practices.
• Enable a third party monitoring service, such as iverify to access your video for monitoring purposes.
• Let an audit service, such as Mystery Shoppers access your video to collaborate with in-store experiences.
• Sell (that’s right sell, as in you make money) video of customers examining merchandise in your store to the manufacturer for marketing purposes.

The list is really endless. And thousands of people could do this at the same time.

You could never do this at scale with an enterprise hosted solution.

My last posts MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video Compared and Managed Video as a Service Explained, introduced the difference between MVaaS and Enterprise Hosted Video as well as the common benefits they both provide. This is the third of 5 posts in a series about the differences. (The previous were MVaaS Total Cost of Ownership and Managing Video Software).

The third differentiator between an enterprise hosted solution and MVaaS is based on the complexity of the network. In a typical enterprise hosted solution, access to the application is via a VPN infrastructure. I built the first VPN applications in 1992 at ANS (which ran the original Internet backbone called the NSFnet. VPN technology has improved significantly since then (thank goodness), but it is still complex to install and administer, especially in an enterprise with many sites.

Why do you need the VPN? The VPN is needed to interconnect each remote DVR with the managed video application. In addition, the VPN is often needed to provide access to the managed video application itself. The Internet can be a dangerous place for an unsuspecting application. If the web software is hosted in your datacenter, you probably don’t want to open it to the big-bad Internet, unless you really know what you are doing with respect to Internet security.

If you already have a VPN built for your company, then it may be simple to add the application to it. However, if you need to build a VPN, you’re in for a big network project.

In contrast, a typical MVaaS application, by its nature, doesn’t require a VPN so that this work is alleviated.

Access to the MVaaS application is through the public Internet and each DVR communicates with the hosted application directly, so no VPN is needed. This results in a simpler network configuration in most cases.

In the spirit of making our value proposition more understandable and more clear, I’ll propose the following question: How long do you think it takes an operator to benefit from being able to see what is going on at their remote locations? Does it take a month, a week, hours of reviewing video?

How about less than 30 seconds?  Ignore for a second the phenomenon that sometimes happens with employees where they instantly behave better once a camera has been installed. (I say to ignore this phenomenon because while it may be instant, it doesn’t last very long – the evidence would be all of the stupid things you see employees doing on surveillance footage that makes its way to CNN – in almost every case they knew there were cameras there)  So do you think that an operator could learn something meaningful about their business in less than 30 seconds?

Here are two real examples that would suggest they can and do.  First, the CEO of a multi-unit retail brand is sitting in a conference room with us getting his first pitch on how he can use video.  We have one of his stores up on the service and pull it up on the projector.  It is a simple live shot of the cashier in one of his stores.  He doesn’t say anything for a few seconds and then, ignoring me, he turns to one of his directors of operations that is in the room and says “is that where the receipt printer is supposed to be?”  The ops guy looked and said “No.  I thought we had moved them all but it looks like we missed that one”  Turns out that the standard store layout has the receipt printer in a certain place on the counter that is consistent with the customer experience this company is trying to create.   While this is a relatively small issue in the grand scheme of things it is also an example of how easy it is for an executive to have an impact if they can just see what is going on in their locations – and in less than 30 seconds.  Note that the receipt printer was moved by the end of that same day.

The second example happened earlier this week when I showed two loss prevention professionals their first site that we had turned up the day before.  I had checked to see what the camera views looked like before showing them how to access their site.  We pulled up video from around 8:00am in the office from earlier that morning – there was a woman counting cash and putting it into several change drawers.  “Let’s see how she does” they said.  She didn’t do very well.  20 seconds into the video the woman leaves the office, three cash drawers open, cash on top of the counter and laying across the cash drawers – she doesn’t return for over a minute. “Yikes – I’ll be calling her tonight”  Major violation in cash handling procedures, less than 30 seconds after looking at the first video ever from that site.

Not every insight will come this quickly, but if you can make video very easy to use and enable users to get to the video that is important to them very quickly, they will better understand their business and can keep improving their operations.

So is this ability to rapidly provide insight unique to MVaaS or do you get it with any low-end traditional DVR solution that you deploy?  Certainly you could have gotten the same insights with a generic no-name DVR with some rudimentary internet access – no question.  Having said that, let me use the same two examples to describe how MVaaS differs.   I’ll do that in another post tomorrow.

The bell, siren and flashing strobe, indicating a new sale has been recorded, has been a standard in many businesses.  To me it conjures up memories of car dealerships, telemarketing departments and carpet stores.  So when we put a giant bell in the center of our offices that our salespeople ring when they close a deal, I was more than a bit skeptical.

But it has been infectious.  Yesterday, one of our sales guys said, “It’s been a couple days and I’m jonesing to ring that bell.”  In our environment, the bell has been the symbol of progress, of cultural change and celebration.  It is helping to link our sales team with our operations and development counterparts who are now asking “what did we win?” and “who is the new client?”  Everyone in the office now stands and applaudes when they hear the bell.

While the bell might not be right for your environment, taking the time to celebrate is.  It has been our way to draw the company together when good things happen.  I’m interested in other ways companies highlight important events and would welcome your thoughts and suggestions. 

Our sales people now have the fever and the only prescription is more cowbell…