I’m not joking.  There are a lot of industry analyst reports and commentaries out that talk about the growing Video Surveillance as a Service market.  Almost to a one they include Envysion as part of this market.  The closest I’ve seen to anyone putting us outside that market is John Honovich’s declaring that we are “taking a contrarian approach to the market”.

Problem is, I don’t view us as being in that market or competing against the other companies that are listed there by the analysts.  In fact, I have never seen a single one of the other companies listed on one list of VSaaS companies (Honovich’s overview of VSaaS providers) in any of the deals we’ve come across, ever.

Let’s start with the definition of VSaaS.  First, the term starts with “Video Surveillance”, which implies the traditional use of video for security and surveillance purposes.  You can use our service for traditional video surveillance but that is not the primary use of our service.   We have a much broader target value proposition and target market, so calling us video surveillance is not accurate.  Second, the primary model being deployed by companies commonly categorized as VSaaS is to provide the same primary functionality that traditional video solutions provide with a couple big differences – they store the video somewhere other than on a DVR in the location where the video is captured and they access the video via the web.  With our SaaS-based service, you certainly access the video and the application on the web, but you can store video on-site or remotely or both.  The location of the video doesn’t matter to us (nor does it need to be transparent to the customer), what matters is what is most efficient for the user and what works best for the application.

We use the term Managed Video as a Service (MVaaS) and not VSaaS for a reason.  When we originally thought through our value proposition and where we fit in the market we wanted a term that didn’t pigeon hole us in the traditional video surveillance world.  We also wanted to convey that there is a lot more complexity to the managed services aspect of the service than simply hosting video off-site.   MVaaS is a promising new market segment where both distributed and centralized video is extended to any desktop, integrated with any business system, and provided as a managed service without the complicated implementation and on-going support requirements of traditional video.  VSaaS as the definition exists is an interesting space with promise and its own set of unique challenges – it just doesn’t happen to be a great description of what we do.

Having said that, I still think it is valuable and important for VSaaS and MVaaS providers to work together to help educate the market and drive overall adoption.  There are numerous opportunities to do this, including the MVaaS Summit this coming summer.  I look forward to learning more about the other business models in the broader space and sharing thoughts on the challenges that both of these markets face as we work to disrupt the traditional markets.