Circling back to the Managed & Hosted Video Summit (see recap) a key focus was on partnering across the ecosystem.  Effective partnering can serve a number of purposes for MVaaS players.  Most importantly, it can accelerate growth.  Partners can deliver capabilities that you don’t have, can deliver complimentary value to fill out a solution for an end customer and of course can also deliver channels to market and/or scale to market.  Any of these if effectively executed can help accelerate growth.  A related benefit of these type of partners is the potential to enable MVaaS providers to focus on what their core competence and not dilute efforts at this critical time for the space.  Of course these benefits don’t come without a price - its critical to both sides of a partnership to set clear goals/objective and select well otherwise partnering can become a distraction and not deliver.

From a MVaaS & Hosted segment maturation perspective partnering is also reflective of validation of the space and the growth opportunity that is present.  When large incubmant players in the ecosystem start looking for MVaaS & Hosted partners as a path to participate in the growth they foresee they are accepting the shift that is occuring (to cloud computing and to the value prop offered).  At the Summit we heard discussion of a number of partnerships that I would say fall into this category.  A few that come to mind are Axis and EMC, Cernium and Sprint and Envysion and Sony.  Obviously I’ve got the most insight into the Sony-Envysion partnership so I’ll use that here.

In the beginning of June, Sony & Envysion announceda partnership to bring integrated solutions to market that combine Envysion’s MVaaS solution with Sony’s leading edge IP cameras and video surveillance technologies.  The partnership involves co-selling, co-marketing, as well as co-development of unique solutions that both companies will bring to market in the retail, restaurant, cinema and services segments.  Customers benefit from the complimentary nature of the partnership - MVaaS as a strategic management tool that delivers bottom line impact across loss prevention, operations, marketing etc and Sony’s leading technologies that accelerate and enable the solution and deliver one of the best known and respected brands in the world.  The partnership goal is to accelerate growth and adoption of the joint solution…the opportunity is certainly there and I will circle back over the months to share how its going.  From a segment perspective it is also additional validation.  The biggest brands and largest players in the world and across the ecosystem recognize the opportunity and potential disruption MVaaS can deliver and are jumping in the game.  Of course these are just the early plays, it will be fun to watch the next set of moves unfold.   Thoughts?