Does your video management system link directly to a network operations center with technicians standing by to help you?

Envysion video does.

Sure we have online help, tips and tricks and that sort of thing.  But with a click on the web, you can get a technician dispatched to any of your locations and have a camera moved, cleaned or refocused.  Your contact details, the location you’re working with and other information is automatically filled out for you.

Our quest has highlighted the use of MVaaS in two areas: Human Resources and Training.  As we continue our discovery of  managed video benefits beyond security, we turn to a department common in heavily franchised enterprises that are tasked with protecting a big piece of the revenue stream.

Revenue Assurance

Large multi-location franchisors generate a significant amount of revenue through royalty fees. Representatives within revenue assurance are tasked with ensuring that royalty revenue is maximized from each franchise location. Many focus on excessive voids, discounting and low average checks to help identify and categorize under performing locations. With Envysion’s POS integration, a revenue assurance scorecard allows representatives to quickly identify the most at-risk locations based on a weighted risk average. MVaaS accomplishes this at an enterprise level, allowing drill-down into the details, video and receipt view of suspect transaction patterns. The added benefit to the franchisee is increased revenue and profitability.

Yesterday we covered how Human Resources leverages Envysion to assist in incident review, documentation and collaboration. Collaboration is a key element to the widespread adoption of MVaaS throughout an enterprise. Today we will focus on another area that leverages video collaboration to consistently deliver the right message to the right people at the right time.

Training

Sharing best practices across a large enterprise in a consistent manner is a daunting task. Using video, training organizations can identify the best, and worst, examples of workplace behavior. This can include: opening and closing procedures, employee appearance, customer interaction, safety and security, loss prevention, prep, product, packaging and more. Leveraging MVaaS, training departments can archive video into categories to be accessed at anytime by a controlled group of users. Think of it as an online content delivery system of best practices to any member of your organization.

In my last post, MVaaS – Video Convergence for the entire Enterprise, I touched on one of the great benefits of Envysion’s MVaaS technology – getting meaningful video and corresponding  data at the fingertips of thousands of users without straining the network or IT resources. Here is the first of several real-world use cases for different organizations who currently leverage Envysion on a daily basis.

Human Resources

Large multi-location enterprises employ thousands of individuals. Human resources representatives spend countless hours and dollars investigating claims that potentially carry enormous liability. Seamlessly getting incident-supporting video and data into the hands of HR representatives saves both time and money. Using Envysion, representatives can investigate specific situations with recorded video, and observe specific individuals with live video. For example, if complaints are received regarding a specific employee in the workplace, MVaaS allows for investigation of the allegations from corporate headquarters, the home office or in the field using an air card. Offsite storage of video within Envysion’s secure data center allows for online incident documentation without taxing corporate IT resources. Ever wanted to share video securely and discretely with colleagues and management? Envysion’s Groups feature makes this possible, ensuring your video is seen only by those you want.

We would like to extend an invitation to the Managed and Hosted Video community to participate in the first Managed & Hosted Video Summit which is scheduled for July 22nd and 23rd in beautiful Boulder, Colorado.

I’m sure most would agree that it’s a unique and exiting opportunity to help establish and shape a new segment, and that’s what this summit is all about. The objective of the summit is to bring managed and hosted video players, ecosystem participants, thought leaders, and investors together for a forum where we can learn, shape our space, and drive the success of the segment.

Please check out the agenda & additional information. I think you can see it’s a great line up over a couple days. And spending a little time in Boulder during the summer isn’t so bad either. Give any of us a call if you’d like to participate or have questions. Hopefully we’ll see you there!

Envysion is moving to a new building and I’ve been turning up a new SaaS application for our use there. The application is managed security as a service. We’ve selected brivo as our solution. I’ll be posting a series of articles over the next few days to give you an update of what its like, as a SaaS provider, to start using a new SaaS application.

Both on this blog as well as in many other forums we’ve seen debate over the fate of the security integrator of today. Part of that debate is if integrators are attuned to customer needs. Another part of the debate questions the value adding role they play (or lack there of) in the context of managed and hosted video. Evidence of thier challenge is the success of video services providers, including Envysion, who have been working directly with customers.
One angle I haven’t seen discussed as much is if we will see a new set of channel players enter the picture. The Reinvention of the Cloud Computing Reseller, a recent article on CRM-News, brought up this angle and I thought it was timely. A couple interesting excerpts:

Because many of today’s SaaS solutions blur the line between a software solution and a business service, a widening array of institutions are now exploring whether they can add SaaS solutions and cloud computing services to their corporate portfolios to better serve their customers and gain a greater competitive advantage.

The article provides Bank of America as its key example. And suggests it’s a ‘win-win’.

BofA recognizes that it needs to offer its customers a broader set of services to better fulfill their needs…Selling SaaS and cloud computing services through an established institution like BofA gives these solutions a new level of credibility in the marketplace.

BofA in this example is aggregating a collection of services that are fairly unrelated but meaningful to thier target customer and providing some degree of ‘trusted advisor’ in reselling cloud services.  So what about for reselling managed and hosted video services? Who’s got next?
While it would be fun to throw names out there, for now I’ll focus on describing a couple potential options. The first is likely pretty obvious, an aggregator of one flavor or another likely functional (everything IT: managed video, network, software etc) or segment oriented (everything retail: real estate, managed video, facilities). The second type of reseller that may emerge is a value added reseller that connects the clouds together in a meaningful way. This ‘cloud connector’ would do things like seamlessly integrate a customers CRM data to their ERP data.  I see this cloud connector as much like the successful system integrator of the past twenty years.  They will resell sets of cloud services that work on their own but also interdependently as a system for customers. 
I’ve got a strong bias that a successful reseller needs to add value so my money is on the cloud connector. I’d be interested in hearing from folks out there some already out there. Our Chief Architect (a.k.a. Jeff Gordon) and I couldn’t come up with a good one.

Sand Hill just released a new study on cloud computing, “Leaders in the Cloud,” and it found that the #1 driver of cloud computing adoption was business agility. They go on to explain that agility in their view incorporates a number of business concepts including flexibility, speed, and innovation.

I reflected on the study and the agility take-away a bit as I was flying to DC for a customer visit. At the end of the day the number one driver for managed video and our MVaaS solution is and will continue to be profit improvement. Together with incredible return on investment, customers see compelling value that in turn drives adoption. While I understand that agility for a customer has value in and of itself I would caution customers and providers alike that going quick without purpose can be just as dangerous as going slowly. As a provider I would never want to lose sight of the application use and bottom line value delivered for customers. Certainly agility for its own sake was not the take-away of the Sand-Hill study. Actually the punch line was as it should be, that adoption will be driven by business value and I could agree more. It may sound strange that someone in the cloud space would deliver a cautionary message – to clarify, my point here is that agility is part of the story. Just as the cloud is part of the story. The cloud offers fundamental advantages to customers and providers alike. It can be an accelerator and differentiator but I hope we learned lessons from the internet explosion and the ongoing mobility boom that at the end of the day it is about value add. Just setting up a web-page didn’t translate to long term success just like putting an application or platform in the cloud won’t either.

So that said, agility is an important part and enabler of the MVaaS value proposition. Customers who are using our application can rapidly scale additional locations, users, and usage. They can immediately receive application updates and requested improvements & refinements. They can easily integrate additional business systems to video and leverage social media influenced collaboration tools. A customer can focus their internal IT resources on other areas and IT investment on value adding solutions vs. help desks and administrators. Customers can immediately leverage Envysion’s growing set of best practices, see their usage statistics and drive continuous operations and profit improvement all in real time.

Yes, at Envysion we put the advantages of being in the cloud and a software as a service provider to good use and we are excited to position our customers with greater business agility. But for us our #1 source of pride will always be delivering bottom line profit improvement and value delivered for customers.

Last week marked my 4th trip to one of the largest security conferences in the U.S., ISC West.  I’ve posted before about the evolution of my trips there and how I’m much more comfortable now wandering the vast sea of video and security providers than I was when I first got into this space.

We never exhibit at the show as it is way to big and doesn’t put us in front of the key decision makers in our target segments.  Having said that, we always go commando and wander the halls talking to potential technology partners and generally staying abreast of who’s doing what.  I spent a full day there last week doing just that.  My general takeaway was again that I think the industry is rather broadly and consistently missing the big picture.

ISC West is a great place for big and small providers alike to exhibit their wares, showing off their latest and greatest technologies.  The show floor is overwhelming with all of the video monitors, HD cameras, video analytics demos, and other cool technologies.  The majority of product announcements are around the latest version of someone’s DVR, their camera, their software or their storage capacity.  You can see the highest resolution megapixel cameras that are available, you can find someone with a crazy amount of storage, you can get a demo of some intriguing analytic capabilities or watch the same guy from last year build a video wall on the coolest touch screen projector you’ll ever see.  Lots and lots of new technology – bright and shiny things.

What you don’t see is the killer application, and this is where I think that the traditional video industry is missing the mark.  There are too many companies that view innovation only as finding the next bell and whistle for their product or making it see more detail, store more video, or do something else better than it did before.  This is important, I’m not suggesting that it isn’t valuable for the industry – there are a lot of applications that will benefit from some of the incremental and evolutionary changes that we see each year in the space.  The logic of these companies is that if they sell widgets and their widget “goes to 11″ when the competitor’s only goes to 10, they will sell more widgets than the competitor, which seems rational enough.

What they appear not to be focused on, however, is finding the killer application.  There’s a good definition of the killer app on wikipedia, which I’ll reference here as well:

“A killer application (commonly shortened to killer app), in the jargon of computer programmers and video gamers, has been used to refer to any computer program that is so necessary or desirable that it proves the core value of some larger technology, such as computer hardware like a gaming console, operating system or other software. A killer app can substantially increase sales of the platform on which it runs.”

Said differently, a killer app is something that creates so much value for customers that it can drive orders of magnitude more demand for the underlying platform on which it is running.  In our world, this would be an application that is so powerful that it actually increases the demand for video services and technologies (cameras, recorders, storage, etc.) rather than just competes for a share of the existing pie.

I’m sure that there are a tremendous number of companies that were at ISC West, were they to read this post, that would comment that this is exactly what they are trying to develop (or may already even claim to have developed).  I am certainly not in a position to judge whether a given company has or hasn’t done this, but I do have strong opinions on what you’d have to have done for this to be true.

I’ll post again tomorrow with my thoughts on what makes a killer application in the world of video surveillance.

Over the past few years, Envysion has pioneered Managed Video as a Service and changed the way large multi-location enterprises deploy and utilize video across their entire organization. One of the most powerful skills we’ve leveraged during this time is also one of the most basic – listening, We listen closely to our customers and prospects alike, inviting them to participate in our development roadmap discussions.

Not only does listening help shape our technology, but our service-oriented approach as well. Teaching our customers best practice utilization ensures that they maximize the return on investment with measurable and material results. This is a commitment we make during the sales process and one we follow through on throughout our partnership.

Over the next week, I’ll share exactly what I mean by “Video Convergence for the entire Enterprise” with real world use-case examples from several different areas within a company. Getting meaningful video into the hands of thousands of people within a single company with no strain on IT or network resources is not a trivial endeavor. MVaaS makes this possible.