Things that impact our sales pipeline for the MV

MilesMeraki
Head in the Cloud

Things that impact our sales pipeline for the MV

I won't also be able to attend. A few things/questions below which normally impacts our sales pipeline for the MV range.

 

1) Camera audio. - Customers want to be able to record sound 🙂

2) The ability to store video files onto a DVR/location? In context at the moment if the MV device is damaged or stollen all video is lost from the camera.

3) Wireless ability. - There's customer uses cases where they don't want to run cabling.

Eliot F | Simplifying IT with Cloud Solutions
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4 REPLIES 4
GeorgeB
Meraki Employee
Meraki Employee

@MilesMeraki

 

1) Check out my response to @ShaneMartin (here)

 

2) This is not something we plan on offering. Today the Meraki MV infrastructure is managing way in excess of a petabyte of data and a billion individual video files. Taking the data off the camera and out of our infrastructure looses the associated metadata and the ability to perform all the cool things we offer such as motion search, heat maps, and motion based retention.

 

We don't want to offload the problem of dealing with large amounts of video to customers when we have already solved that management aspect. We know some customers want to store longer or have offsite backup, and we will investigate how to offer this in the future.

 

Regarding camera destruction or theft, no system offers perfect protection from a disaster. I have personally spoken to customers whos hard disks died, RAID arrays became corrupted, or even one who had their NVR stolen. In each instances, all video was lost. With MV, yes you may loose a camera, but the likelihood of catastrophic data loss is significantly lower. If camera theft and destruction is of concern, use the MV71. It is extremely rugged and I can personally attest to beating one with baseball bats, crowbars, and hammers. It is a tough little beasty.

 

3) This comes up now and again as an ask. My main question back is "How would you power it?"

If one can get power to the camera, but not ethernet, the latest Powerline technology is pretty good, and lash up an injector.

Robin St.Clair | Principal, Caithness Analytics | @uberseehandel
CCP619
Conversationalist

Regarding 2) Your argument is very poor.  Anyone using cameras in the field has to deal with reality and not pie-in-the-sky views of what should be.  The video off-load problem is a simple retention and records problem and not a "cool toys" issue.  Let the camera keep the most immediate data with all the extra abilities.  Companies like mine need the data to be available for up to a year.  Why is this a foreign concept.  We accept the responsibility for doing all the leg work and not having the motion search and other extras with the saved video.  The NEED is real and what Meraki should realize is that it is killing these cameras for wide-spread use.  Why is Meraki not seeing the arbitrary limit this lack of understanding is creating?  Why is such a basic need being ignored?

 

The statement "We don't want to offload the problem of dealing with large amounts of video to customers when we have already solved that management aspect." is wrong.  You have not "solved that management aspect", you have limited that management aspect.  You have limited the usefulness of this device by making it have an arbitrary retention limit.

 

Here is a real fact:  I need to deploy up to 400 cameras in the next 12 months.  I need data retention from some of the cameras to be longer than a month.  Simple and straight forward is the realization that I can't have someone go camera-by-camera and download the data manually.  I have the storage capacity and the equipment to keep these files protected against loss for that time period and I accept the responsibility to maintain that archive.   

Can Meraki sacrifice a sale of this size for the sake of a mis-guided "principle"?

CCP619
Conversationalist

All three of your questions have been answered by a simple home-use camera: Nest (Not that the Nest is suitable for an Enterprise solution)

The problems do not seem to be as difficult as you espouse, so I suggest you might want to re-evaluate your position.

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