Insight Marketplace / VSaas 'Apps' Examined

Published Nov 02, 2010 00:00 AM
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In November 2010, Envysion announced a partnership program called the Insight Marketplace [link no longer available]. While partner announcements are common and generally uninteresting, we think Envyison's is notable. Specifically, Envysion is leveraging its VSaaS offering to greatly simplify partner implementation.

The Insight Marketplace connects third party service providers such as loss prevention auditing services, remote monitoring, analytics, etc. to Envysion's customer's surveillance systems.

Normally, such partnerships are accomplish by sales forces co-marketing and a fairly complex implementation. Either the partner's system needs to be deployed on-site (co-located with the recorder) or remote connectivity/VPN access to the site needs to be established (for the remote partner system - such as virtual guard services). Both of these approaches are fairly time consuming, costly and diminish interest in pursuing such systems.

By contrast, since Envysion already has direct connectivity into the on-site recorders for full management/viewing (it's a managed video service), the partner's system does not need to be deployed on-site nor does the partner need to negotiate with IT to allow remote access for their system. With customer permission, Envysion can simply and quickly provide access to partner's with no on-site changes nor IT negotiations.

Use of 3rd party auditing and monitoring services are extremely low in retail. We believe a primary reason for this is that implementation difficulties discourage adoption.

Envysion's approach is a good opportunity for them and a template for the future of VSaaS providers.

For Envysion, they can up-sell their existing customer base (a few hundred customers with a number of notable chain QSRs [link no longer available]) and better attract new customers with a broader service portfolio.

For VSaaS providers in general, as this matures, they will be able to offer a broader portfolio of 3rd party integrations and services that will increase their competitive differentiation.

From a business model perspective, partners can directly bill Envysion's customers and Envysion will receive a percentage of revenue that they note is "not Apple App Store-like numbers".

Envysion will start announcing specific partners later in November 2010.