I’ve posted before on the various channel partners that I believe are good fits for our service and for MVaaS in general.  There are a lot of potential partners that are interested in adding a recurring, managed service to their portfolio, particularly one that is differentiated and has a very measurable and powerful ROI.

Two segments in particular are (or should be) very natural channels: security integrators and broadband service providers.  When we first launched our channel efforts about a year ago, we decided to focus the bulk of our efforts on establishing partnerships with those two segments to see which one takes off faster.  We’ve gotten very good early traction with partners in both spaces and have been supporting a number of partners and pursuing a number of large opportunities with both.

Given its been a year, I thought I’d give a quick readout on how the two channels are developing.  The short answer is that broadband service providers (BSPs) are ahead by a mile.  This is great for broadband service providers, but should serve as a bit of a wake up call for the security integrators that they are going to face competition from a new segment that is much more aggressively adopting technology that will leapfrog a lot of what is in the market today.

Before I get into why BSPs are ahead, let me put some numbers on it to give you some context (per a motto from my Bain days, “in God we trust, everyone else bring data”).  Envysion works with partners to jointly sell to large multi-unit businesses like retail and restaurants.  We are either in pilot or the early stage of rollout with a number of large customers with our partners.  Security integrators in total have us in front of customers that control in aggregate a couple thousand sites.  Almost all of these opportunities are ones in which we had some traction on our own and either ceded control to the security integrator who was also there or introduced the integrator in an effort to “prime the channel pump”.  In contrast, our BSP partners have introduced us into customer prospects that control in aggregate more than 15,000 locations, none of which we had a prior relationship.

The quality and pace of the activity coming out of the BSP channel is orders of magnitude better than it is out of the security integrator channel.  Clearly there is a chance this could be something we are causing ourselves by supporting one channel more effectively than the other, but in this case I think it is structural.

I’ll spend some time over the weekend putting my thoughts together in a concise way on this topic and will post the key points on why I think this is happening.

Have you ever heard of the Hawthorne Effect?

The Hawthorne Effect is a term from psychology that describes the tendency of people to act differently when they know they are being studied.  The concept was named by Henry Landsberger, who was busy in the 1950’s analyzing experiments from the 1920’s at the Hawthorne Works.

The earlier experiments were designed to measure the impact of lighting on worker productivity.  Presumably they expected to find that worker productivity increased with better lighting.  However, this was not what they found.  Instead, the original researchers observed productivity improvement in both control groups, regardless of the lighting.

The researchers were puzzled by the result.  Presumably it was not until Mr. Landsberger reviewed their work was his theory postulated.

The Hawthorne Effect has since been used to describe any short-lived productivity improvement that occurs because individuals are being watched.

So what happens if you apply this concept to MVaaS customers?  If MVaaS is deployed to several “test” sites, and these sites achieve greater performance than the other “non-test” sites in the enterprise, could you dismiss the findings and conclude that this is due to the Hawthorne Effect?

I was recently asked by a customer if I could help him pull 30 minutes of video from 4 different cameras and then send it to him.  The problem with sending video clips is that the size of the file can be very large making it difficult to email.  A 2 minute video clip is about 2MB so a 30 minute clip would be much too large to email. 

 With MVaaS from Envysion a customer can log in remotely and download the video directly to the PC themselves without ever needing to send a thing.  Envysion also provides a feature called My Clips which allows cusotmers to download video and save it directly to our secure data center as well.  The My Groups feature allows customers to remotely share the video saved in My Clips with anyone in the organization without ever sending a thing.

The tools Envysion provides make it very easy to download and share video but the customer asked if I could still help them with these 30 minutes clips.  They were traveling and needed to get these video clips to an officer for an investigation which led me to a great service called Yousendit.com.   They provide digital content delivery so I signed up for the basic service which is free and allows me to send up to a 1GB file.  I was able to help my customer and sent the four 30 minute clips, about 60 MB of video. 

Having the right tool for the job can really save time and money.  The MVaaS provided by Envysion and the SaaS provided by Yousendit.com are both great tools that can really help get the job done.

Fredrik Nilsson of Axis wrote an article at SecurityInfoWatch about how SaaS is taking off in video surveillance.  It’s a good article and highlights some of the reasons that SaaS is gaining momentum, although as you would expect it is definitely told from the IP camera manufacturers perspective.

A key point jumped out for me as I was reading it.

Fredrik states that “instead of maintaining the recording and monitoring station locally, companies can now limit their capital investment to just the cameras and a gateway or router to the hosted storage. The vendor provides the servers that archive the video and manages them for the business”. To me this is one of the broader misconceptions I come across in the market: that SaaS in video surveillance equates to “hosted storage”. SaaS is a method of delivering functionality through software that is hosted in the network. Remote or hosted storage is an architectural decision that one can make depending on the circumstances.

I have talked to people that have declared that they tried to build a SaaS application, but they couldn’t get the service to scale b/c of the bandwidth limitations of streaming all of their customers cameras all of the time (here’s a hint: if you don’t have to stream the video all the time, don’t). I have also seen numerous players in the space touting their software as a service models when they have a hosted storage offering but you still need to load their video management software on your PC or a server in your enterprise in order to access the video.

The Axis article and these anecdotes highlight the fact that while SaaS is gaining momentum in video, many people still don’t understand exactly what it means to provide a SaaS offering. There are some great articles on SaaS at SandHill if you are looking for a bit more of a primer. In the meantime, I’ll take the increased visibility and focus on SaaS video businesses, even if a lot of people don’t yet get what it is.

Over at IP Video Market Info John Honovich has a good discussion going regarding megapixel without IP.  The topic might also be labeled: “What’s the best way to retrofit an existing analog system for megapixel video?”

Currently megapixel requires IP cameras which can be a costly upgrade if you are all analog today.  IP is very different from an install perspective and requires new cabling and complex configuration of IP addresses, cameras and NVR’s.  Or does it?

IP cameras can be auto configured with a good vms system. we at Envysion implemented auto-discovery and configuration in less than 30 days for Axis IP cameras. Using zeroconf and a simple http api we can now do it in just a couple days and push the software update into production automatically.

Ethernet can run over coax (IEEE 10Base2 is based on rg58 (50ohm), but with tweaks can run on rg59 (75ohm). There are a number of products that do this now, but they are currently a bit clunky and perhap too expensive. But that can be fixed. Just need some IP cameras with an integrated Ethernet over rg59 interface to get the cost down and provide a clean install.

In a recent post, I wrote about the economic impact of hitting and not hitting store level KPIs. It’s imperative that everyone involved in the business process have the same goals in mind – those that govern daily behaviors towards the ultimate reward of profitability. This includes, management, staff and yes, vendors (or as I like to call them, business partners).

Let’s face it, operating a profitable restaurant or retail business is a difficult task. Success lies in the ability to flawlessly execute upon well defined business processes and procedures with little to no variance, every day. The wage level employed in these environments is often ill-equipped to consistently execute due to inexperience or lack of maturity. What one gives up with inconsistency is sales and expense, and that translates directly to decreased profitability.

There are several tactics to ensure the proper beahviors are on display at all times to ensure flawless execution. I personally advocate the following: Training, followed by monitoring, measurement, correction and improvement. This cycle repeats itself indefinately in the spirit of a constantly improving business process.

So how does MVaaS help one achieve KPIs? It’s one of the five steps noted above – monitoring. Leveraging MVaaS in a routine store audit process will ensure that behaviors which compromise the ability to achieve KPIs are eradicated from the business process. I will follow up soon with several specific examples of how this works, the economic impact to the bottom line and ultimately, the Return on Investment.

I was pondering Matt’s recent post about manufacturer’s claims when I came upon this article on Cheerios.  Check out the warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration.  This is not something I would like to find on my desk on a Monday morning.

Caveat emptor, to be sure.

John Honovich has a great post on whether you can believe manufacturers’ claims or not. While I am a service provider and my comments will fall under this same scrutiny, I definitely think the answer to this is generally “not without some proof or evidence”.

Take a couple of recent press releases in the industry as an example. I won’t name names to protect the “innocent”, but if you read the major trade magazines or follow the press releases some of the players in the market issue, you’ll have seen these (or a dozen just like them).

The first announces the acquisition by Company A (a medium sized video provider with decent traction in a specific retail segment) of Company B (a tiny, struggling video provider with a small customer base) and declares the result “a combination that dominates the specific retail segment”. Last time I checked, taking a company with few meaningful customers and adding it to one with decent traction but that is no where near the leader in a space doesn’t yield a dominate anything. Unless a potential prospect knew both of these companies in detail, they would not have a way to judge the validity of the claim.

The second announcement was a partnership announcement between a video provider and a security company. The video provider (whose press release announced the deal) declared that part of the rationale was the provider’s most advanced industry leading point of sale integration capabilities. In this case the industry leading capability apparently comes from a resold text overlay solution that just about everyone in the industry can do.  Again, unless a prospect knew enough about POS integration in general, and what this company offers specifically, they could not effectively evaluate the claim.

Is any of this illegal or unethical or even a little bit wrong? I don’t think so – marketers will spin and position and make statements that create a positive view of a company and its capabilities, even if they are sometimes a little bit ahead of the company’s ability to deliver. Having said that, it makes it very difficult for end-users to understand what a company can really offer and how it differentiates itself from the competition.

It also makes it difficult for service providers to create awareness and educate the market on real advantages, as they have to cut through a lot of the noise that other vendors create with claims that aren’t really substantiated.

The answer to all of this is to look for and demand evidence to support a vendor’s claim (and awards don’t count, as John mentions) If a vendor says it has the most advanced POS integration, have them show you it in production with a major customer and explain why it is different. If a vendor says that they dominate a specific market, have them tell you how many customers they have relative to the competition and give you individual references that you can check. If a vendor says that their solution has a powerful return on investment, have them explain who got it and how it was derived.

It’s easy to sound great when they get to write their own bios – it’s a little more challenging when they have to back it up with facts.

A new report from Retail Systems Research states:

while retailers that use IT strategically have the opportunity to turn technological advantage into real long term market gains, most survey respondents report a growing backlog of demand for IT services driven by lack of governance, tangled obsolete application portfolios, and siloed departments each clamoring for their own solutions. 

MVaaS can help alleviate these issues because it is a managed solution, requiring little more than permission from the IT department to deploy.  With no servers or software to manage on desktops and managed DVR’s, the solution is simple to deploy.  This helps address limited resources and managing of many tangled applications.  When an IT solution is very easy to deploy and requires little involvement from IT, many of details of getting the job done become non-issues.

Recent discussions with current clients and prospects have primarily focused on one simple question – “How do you measure success?” Nearly all companies have a set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are used as a health check and management incentive. Ultimately, they are created and measured to ensure one thing – profitability.

What is the economic impact if these KPIs are not achieved? What is the economic impact if they are? I do know one thing – hitting them all at the same time in a month/quarter is a very difficult task. When it did occur, it was as if the planet and stars aligned and there was a pot of gold in the bottom line of our P&L. When it didn’t occur, we we’re lucky to break even after an entire month’s effort.

Stay tuned. I will explain how partnering with Envysion’s MVaaS helps retail operators and management achieve KPIs across the entire enterprise.