I’ve been studying new technologies in the security industry for over twenty years. When estimating how successful a new product or company will be, there are many factors. One of the biggest is how easy is it for new users to accept the new solution.
This issue recently came up in John Honovich’s recent post:
http://ipvideomarket.info/report/objectvideo_poor_reputation_and_blaming_others
John takes ObjectVideo to task for blaming others for the slower adoption of their video analytics.
Brian Baker at ObjectVideo had written:
“Many in our industry correlate the need for trained users and the need to configure the analytics with the notion that analytics, as a whole, are immature and unreliable. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
Brian took the position that highly complex stuff requires training, and this is the same for SAP and Oracle systems. That doesn’t mean it is immature. It simply requires expertise.
Well, this is a perfect example of the the technology acceptance curve. If you have something different that requires new levels of training and new skill sets to be taught, you should expect sales of that product to grow slowly. There is no way it can take off rapidly or be adopted quickly. Why? Because you have to first build a whole new cadre of skilled workers before the system can be deployed.
In the late 1990′s when DVRs were still PC based software products, their sales grew incredibly slowly. They had been around for years, but so few integrators used them that many wondered if they would ever succeed.
The company I worked for then (Interlogix) and a few others in the industry took a different approach. We designed DVRs that were embedded appliances and worked exactly like the VCRs that everyone had been using for years. The sales of DVRs suddenly boomed.
The DVR business went from maybe $50M worldwide, to over $500M in a 2-3 years, and doubled again shortly after. That’s how quickly it changed once the technology acceptance curve was overcome.
The problem with the first PC based DVRs is that very few of the video integrators knew how to use them or how to fix them when they broke. It was a whole new world of computer software, and without extensive training they were afraid to adopt them. It was simply too much of a time investment, and too many opportunities to get caught in a hornet’s nest because you didn’t know what you didn’t know. So, most installers avoided DVRs unless they absolutely had no other choice.
Once they could pull out a VCR and replace it with a DVR that worked almost exactly the same – that’s when DVRs started selling like hotcakes.
A lot of people confuse this with “ease of use”, which is also important but is different. The technology acceptance curve is more about how familiar something is and how intuitive it is to use based on what people know and have used before.
This why I’ve long said that widespread use of video analytics would not begin until it was as easy to install as traditional video motion detection, which everyone is familiar with. Then anyone who knows how to install a camera would know how to install video analytics.
That’s what makes the adaptive analytics that we use at VideoIQ so significant. It is the only technology that gets rid of all that need for camera calibration and tuning required by other technologies. This means that anyone who knows how to use an IP camera can use our iCVR.
In fact, we’ve had quite a few installers who simply took our iCVR out of its box, plugged it in, and it was working. We rarely need to send someone out to help anyone understand how to use our analytics. Our number one tech calls are over IP related issues: How do you set up port forwarding on a router, or how to track down network problems…
It is still a good idea to understand video analytics, so you know where best to use it and what to avoid. So, we offer on-line training. But the skill set of knowing how to tune and calibrate a camera are not needed.
Sam Pfeifle, from Security Systems News, and I will be talking about this and other key technology differences that matter when using video analytics, along with the most popular uses for it – outdoor protection – in a webinar this coming Thursday. You can watch live, or you can watch it later if you can’t make the time:
The need for training can seem like a small thing, but this ends up being one of the biggest factors in how quickly a new technology spreads. That’s why the most important advances are often the ones that seem almost invisible, because people gain all the new benefits without having to change their lives.
