From The Editor

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By Matt Pillar, editor in chief

The retail industry was well represented at the 56th annual ASIS International Seminar And Exhibits in Dallas last week. Of the dozen-or-so video surveillance and analytics companies I met with over the course of the show, all of them placed retail among their top 5 vertical targets for 2011.

For many of the video services providers we met with at ASIS, it's the broadening landscape of video-enhanced retail applications that makes this an attractive industry to target. Many executives that I met with, like Marty Guay, US President for video integrator Niscayah, cited opportunities to serve stakeholders from store operations and marketing, for instance, with video-enhanced applications. Securing buy-in from interdisciplinary teams is central to the sales strategy for many video solution providers in the coming year.

The question remains; how will these companies package cross-disciplinary offerings and take them to market? Achieving buy-in from marketing and operations on the concept of leveraging the video surveillance infrastructure for people counting, dwell time analysis, marketing via PVMs (public view monitors), and store compliance is not a one-size-fits-all proposition. As Milestone sales and marketing exec Hedgie Bartol puts it, "when it comes to business drivers outside of LP, there's still a great deal of discovery involved in the planning phases of IP video rollouts, resulting in lots of customization at the deployment stage." While many experts in the vendor and end user communities are lauding the possibilities, there aren't many retailers sharing success stories about interdepartmental video platform application success. I suspect this has more to do with competitive advantage and nondisclosure than it does adoption rate, though adoption of video-enhanced apps outside the LP department is not very popular yet. Still, the current advantage is the retailer's — video solutions providers and integrators are hungry and willing to build tailored solutions as they navigate a new landscape of possibilities for video in retail. But with the opportunity comes a challenge that shouldn't be taken lightly — a broadening number of stakeholders brings with it a broadening, and therefore more difficult to manage, chain of custody. Who gets access to the system? When? Why? What applications take precedence?

Clearly, LP efforts still provide the clearest path to ROI on IP video. The marketing, merchandising, and operational application benefits are conceptually sound, but a tipping point for their adoption remains to be seen. Are you a retailer leveraging your IP video infrastructure for applications outside the LP department? I'd like to hear about it. E-mail me at matt.pillar@jamesonpublishing.com.