Scott Beck met the team at Envysion yesterday morning. On behalf of Envysion, thank you Scott for taking the time to speak with us!
In his address, Scott shared his thoughts on what is required to create successful businesses. These include an attractive and addressable market, a compelling value proposition for the customers, and a committed management team.
However, even for companies that have all of this, success is not guaranteed.
Why? Scott’s term for it was limiting constraints. All organizations (and for that matter all individuals) have constraints that limit their effectiveness. This is somewhat self-evident. We are all imperfect, and the organizations that we create are likewise so. What is most important is how companies react to their limitations. Companies that fail in this regard severely impact their opportunity for success.
What are the limiting constraints that you have experienced in your organization? What have you done to overcome them?
At the intersection of video, data, time and place lies all the value to be gleaned from video.
If you’ve got data which includes a timestamp and a location, wouldn’t it be great if you could just paste a link to the video? What if some software could automatically do it for you?
If we had a simple web based standard for that, interfacing between any application and video could be as easy as pasting a link to YouTube.
The great part about this is that this is actually a pretty easy technical problem to solve. But the problem is there are so many ways to do and and not everyone does it the same way. This is going to change, and soon.
Envysion has a new look. While a logo in and of itself won’t secure more customers or increase stakeholder value, it can be meaningful as an expression of the brand. The new Envysion logo is intended to communicate a sophisticated, clean, confident look that bespeaks our positioning as an innovator in video surveillance.
Old logo:
New logo:
What’s missing?
A couple days ago Matt Steinfort posted on the significant investment dollars that are funding both start-up and well established companies in the broader video market.
Is this another case of irrational exuberance? Not by a long shot.
Capital infusions of this significance are not executed on a whim. The investors conduct extensive research on the company seeking investment and the greater landscape of the marketplace. They must be convinced that the target company is in a segment poised for growth, and that the team assembled is capable and well-positioned to capture a portion of this growth.
Investing in the absence of either is simply hoping that the “greater fools theory” prevails.
Contributing to the attractiveness of the video market are projections referenced in stories like this one. In a recent report, ABI Research projected that the video surveillance market (which includes surveillance cameras, computers and storage, professional services and hardware infranstructure) is poised to grow to $46.0 billion by 2013 from $13.5 billion in 2006.
This is an annual compounded growth rate of nearly 20% per year!
This type of projected growth tends to draw a crowd, and suggests that MVaaS providers and partners are in the right place at the right time. Carpe diem!
I received a fair amount of feedback from a recent post, “MVaaS – Worth its Weight in Cheese”. One question, posted in a comment by John Honovich, asked “Can you explain how this is different than a normal DVR?”.
It’s a great question that I’m not only happy to answer but even more excited to receive. Why? It demonstrates that MVaaS is somehow different than normal. We have broken ground with new technology transforming ordinary surveillance into a uniquely powerful enterprise video solution.
Following is the comment response. Thank you John for raisng the question.
At the core of Envysion’s value proposition is its ability to provide operational and marketing insights across the enterprise. The hosted aspect of the technology provides a single web-based interface for access and administration of multiple sites. When combined with enterprise data integration, such as POS, you have a powerful and real-time reporting, alerting and viewing platform.
If you want a visual understanding of comps, voids, staffing levels, work-flow analysis or who is typically purchasing product from 8-10pm, the Envysion technology allows you to do this, across multiple locations from a single login.
As it’s a managed service, there’s no software to maintain on your network or remote viewing computer. Additionally, we continually upgrade our hosted software based on recommendations from our customers. About every 30 days, these enhancements push dynamically to all users.
I read a good post by Brad Feld dealing with a recent accounting pronouncement (Feld Thoughts – FAS 157 – Another Annoying Accounting Provision). He promises more on the subject, and I’m looking forward to the posts to come.
Now that I’ve mentioned accounting, I’ll pause briefly, allowing you to complete your yawn. . . but I do urge you to read Brad’s post. It is very funny and decidedly anti-accountant, a popular sentiment after six years of SOX compliance and 146 years of benevolence from the IRS. I think you’ll enjoy his take on the topic.
That being said, and in the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a certified public accountant. However, I have a somewhat different background than many of my brethren in that I majored in psychology as an undergraduate. How did I find my way to accounting from psychology? Probably not important. What did occur to me, however, was a possible new business opportunity. Think about it. I could offer the technical reasoning for the necessity of an accounting pronouncement, and then provide counseling services post-op to subjects that remain light-headed. Talk about a two-fer. The green visor crowd would be envious…
That is a good question that many restaurant owners have to deal with on a regular basis. It can also be difficult to prove who it is that actually is taking the cookie from the jar.
By integrating Envysion Video with POS systems we give the business owner an incredible tool that can tie every transaction with video to instantly see who is taking the cookies.
With that said it is nice to be able to catch the people taking the cookies but what if we could prevent the cookies from even being taken in the first place?
Bradley L. Burt, the President & CEO of Maid-Rite Corporation who has approximately 75 franchise restaurants operating throughout the Midwest, demonstrates the capabilities of the Envysion system during the training of new employees in their franchisee Maid-Rite restaurants in the five day pre-opening onsite training provided to the franchisees by the Maid-Rite Corporate trainers and says “When we train the new franchisee employees and show them how their managers can view the details of every point of sale transaction, we usually have a couple new employees that won’t show up the next morning. They realize that it will be very difficult to steal and they move on and look for an easier restaurant to work in that doesn’t have an integrated point of sale system and camera system.”
By using Envysion’s Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS), restaurant owners can not only see who it is that is taking the cookies but it prevents many of the cookies from ever leaving the jar in the first place.
You may remember the hilarious SNL character Theodoric of York, Medieval Barber. If not, here is a link to the hulu site.
Theodoric of York (clip)
It’s certainly easy to laugh at the ignorance of our ancestors. Then again, I wonder if we’ll be proud of all the things we “know” 100 years from now…
What is the moral?
- Speak only of which you are certain?
- Stay off the cutting edge, because it could be wrong?
- Avoid toads and leeches?
No, Nah and Nope.
Rather, I would suggest that it is the following:
Know what you know. Learn what you don’t. Challenge both.
This holds true for many areas of life, and it is specifically applicable to business. Leaders who fail in this regard risk being obsoleted.
Do you think that video providers are experts in all aspects of their own business? What about their suppliers? Competitors? Are they experts in their customers businesses? If they aren’t, how can they possible meet the needs and requirements of their customers?
The MVaaS providers that will succeed will be those that:
- Understand what they know about their ecosystem, with special consideration for their customers,
- Learn about what they don’t know,
- Continually challenge it all.
My college hockey coach used to say, “If we’re not winning, we’re learning.” Today’s economic “lessons” are a great case in point. While many of us don’t feel like winners when we look at our stock portfolios, if we step back, we can observe what we’re learning on a macro level about the way we do business. To name a few:
- We’re cutting out waste, with a great case in point being restaurants who seek ways to keep food costs down by reigning in portion sizes, tightening up line operations and buying more local produce to keep transportation costs down. Managing multiple operations without racking up expensive driving miles is easier now than ever, thanks to such powerful tools as MVaaS.
- Energy companies are developing alternative fuels, like sun, wind, and even algae (really, check it out)
- Workers are learning different ways to be effective, making telecommuting more than just a way to work in your pajamas.
- Automobile companies are down-sizing their vehicles to come into line with acceptable fuel consumption levels
- Another silver lining: you can get a killer deal on a truck or SUV…or a house in Detroit.
A friend of mine asked me the other day how my business was faring. He wondered whether the recessionary environment was hurting me given the fact that many of my customers are in the retail and restaurant markets where times are pretty tough lately.
While I wouldn’t say that the recession is good for business (tighter budgets are never a good thing), there are some positives. For one, if operators are worried about growing profitability and can’t do it by driving top line revenue (visits are down, it is tough to add new units), they can certainly increase profits by addressing the bottom line by managing their stores more effectively – this is a great lead in for MVaaS discussions.
If that’s not enough, recessions can also cause an increase in the amount of activity that loss prevention groups (big customers of video solutions) need to track. There’s an article on this in that bastion of literary excellence, The USA Today, 
titled “More consumers, workers shoplift as economy slows”
So while the recession is not doing me any personal favors (nothing like watching the stock market lose a couple points a day and paying $4.25 a gallon to get you pumped about our nation’s economy) it may in fact be helping me out on the company side.
