The cloud based video analytics industry is growing at breakneck speeds. According to Fortune Business Insights the market is projected to surpass $37.55 billion by 2030, exhibiting a CAGR of 23.9%. Meanwhile, as dozens of cloud based video analytics platforms are in an existential race to grow and expand market share, the infrastructure upon which they build those platforms is presenting itself as a key ingredient to ensure survival.
Technical concerns like latency and efficiency combine with overall price to create a situation wherein a company’s infrastructure can have serious consequences on their ability to compete.
Zadara currently partners with players in the video analytics industry to help them enter new geographies and grow their business. By leveraging local edge clouds, companies have been able to consistently win new business with solutions that feature extremely low latency at a price that is 30% cheaper than competitors.
Many cloud-based video analytics platforms are locating their clouds in public cloud environments. But, while traditional public cloud providers offer many benefits, video and analytics companies are gaining a strategic advantage by leveraging edge cloud locations for latency sensitive workloads.
With over 500 cloud locations worldwide and with the ability to deploy a cloud in any location, Zadara’s local edge clouds are meeting the unique demands of cloud based video analytics platforms. As an added benefit, Zadara clouds are AWS compatible and customers can also expect to pay zero data egress fees.
Latency
For those in the high performance video analytics industry, dealing with latency in a new geography has historically meant sacrificing either profitability or market share. The options being either to invest in local infrastructure to serve the new market or not to bid at all and just leave that geography to a competitor.
The typical solution is either to buy hardware and install it close to the site or to leverage an on-premises solution. Unfortunately, on premises options would necessitate investing upfront capital investment with further system integration costs to manage and integrate that environment into the wider platform. Likewise, most public cloud on premises solutions have size requirements, data transfer fees, and long minimum commitments which can make them economically unfeasible for projects in the industry.
Both of these options can present significant risk when entering new markets including upfront capital commitments, unknown market conditions and stiff competition.
However, by leveraging an edge cloud companies can simplify their infrastructure requirements by easily deploying at existing on-demand cloud locations. With over 500+ existing locations, Zadara’s edge cloud model delivered as-a-service means that allocating new dedicated resources in a brand new geography represents very little risk on the part of our customers.
If latency is critical to your project and you’re expanding to new markets, Zadara is designed for you. With resources delivered as-a-service customers and partners can enter new geographies with little initial investment and then scale quickly to meet growing demands. This is a key reason why Zadara is seeing so much success in the video analytics industry.
Cost of data transfer
While latency can be key to performance, issues such as the cost of data transfer can easily make or break the profit margins.
When relying on the public clouds, egress fees alone can become unsustainable when considering the petabytes of high quality video that frequently need to be taken out of those environments. Ingress/egress fees as well as the massive network costs incurred by sending constant high quality video feeds over long distances for analysis are the types of “hidden costs” that quickly add up.
Compare this with a recent case in which an edge cloud solution from Zadara was deployed only a few miles from where the data was being generated and thus did not incur anywhere near the costs associated with transcontinental data transfers. As Zadara does not charge customers data transfer fees, video and analytics companies can move large volumes of data with ease.
Efficiency
Beyond direct technological and price advantages, there are also strategic structural advantages afforded to companies that can deploy resources close to the edge. Specifically, it is the case that not all analytics have to be done at the same time. Some need to be performed in real time while others can be done at a slower pace to get more long term insights.
Historically there haven’t been many unified solutions that offered customers the option to implement edge vs core site analytics in any meaningful manner. Either one could integrate an on-premises solution at the edge with a central cloud location or those utilizing a hyperscaler environment would just perform all analytics at the same location and thus realize none of the efficiencies of this system.
Fortunately, not only can a Zadara customer decide to implement an edge vs core analytics system, but Zadara is designed to be compatible with hyperscalers thus opening up the possibility to maintain an existing cloud in key locations and supplement with Zadara for capabilities needed at the edge.
Thus, Zadara Edge Cloud provides a path to enter new geographies in a manner that minimizes the risks normally associated with leveraging a new cloud provider. Moreover, this is all done while creating a more efficient use of resources than merely sending everything back to one location for all analysis.
Price
While price isn’t the most important factor in conversations around infrastructure, it is always influential. With simplified predictable billing as well as zero egress fees, Zadara is routinely able to shave 30-40% off of our customers’ bills at large public cloud providers.
For those in the video analytics industry, the ability to repeatedly win on price has quickly become a strategic advantage for three reasons:
- Price wins business: While no price point will make up for bad technology, good pricing helps win bids, bad pricing loses bids, and it’s that simple.
- Price preserves margin: Rather than trading margin for market share, advantageous pricing keeps money in the company
- Price drives innovation: Being free from pricing battles allows companies to do what they do best, innovate and improve their product.
With this in mind, it is easy to see how looking at alternative cloud providers like Zadara can help video analytics companies realize the kind of strategically significant cost savings that can help them consistently gain and retain market share.
Conclusion
The current state of the video analytics industry is one where dozens of different players are scrambling for market share. Yet, while many are building their platforms on the same infrastructure as their competitors, some companies are starting to realize significant advantages over their competition by looking at alternative cloud providers.
By leveraging an edge cloud, Zadara customers in the industry have won tenders in new markets by offering solutions with extremely low latency at a price that is 30% cheaper than competitors.
Being able to compete so aggressively on technology and price has allowed our video analytics customers to realize strategic advantages over competing platforms built on legacy hyperscalers.
To learn more please feel free to speak with one of our cloud specialists.
