The Devil's in the Details
Online Versus Product-Based Reporting
Along the lines of free versus paid solutions, there is also a question of online versus product-based solutions. This one is abit harder to gauge, often requiring case-by-case review.
If privacy concerns are paramount, use of a product-based solution may be the only solution; recent advances in privacy policies and the use of encryption in hosted data may help sway certain customers towards the convenience of a hosted SaaS solution.
In terms of product-based reporting and analytics, these packages are often found as part of a larger solution. As I mentioned before, there are integrated reporting solutions in CMS and ERP solutions that track storage and delivery of particular file types.
But what about companies that want to gather data from many disparate sources? In the case of ERP solutions, the business processes may utilise non-ERP data, such as streaming and customer engagement details.
Ray Wang, a partner with Altimeter Group, a company that measures enterprise strategy, says, "We see a lot more use of specialist solutions when the data is heterogeneous and when customers have advanced use cases that go beyond simple reporting."
Beyond simple reporting, Wang is referring to a need for a more detailed business intelligence (BI) solution that gathers data from a variety of locations, including human and physical resource systems, production and logistics solutions, as well as customer resource management (CRM) systems.
BI solutions often have their own programming languages and algorithms that exceed the basic scripting functions of a structuredquery language (SQL) database. A number of the standalone BI vendors have been bought by IBM, Oracle, and SAP.
Omniture, which Adobe acquired recently, is a BI solution on one level, as it can provide web analytics at a very detailed level.But as one recent report notes, "BI managers are wary of the firehouse of web traffic data, and most web managers just don’t think much about non-web data stores and the value of website metrics to the broader enterprise."
Back in the world of streaming, in scenarios where an enterprise doesn’t need the heavy lifting of BI to track its streaming uptake, the decision to use product-based solutions is more apparent; most streaming server solutions—including those byAdobe Apple, Real, and Microsoft—have built-in reporting capabilities about live and on-demand streams; a few also have details on progressive download and HTTP delivery.
Keynote Systems does offer an inside-the-firewall stream monitoring service, which it gears towards customers that are doing pre-deployment testing who need private network monitoring or who have sensitive streaming content.
For companies using rich media recording and playback solutions from companies such as Accordent or Sonic Foundry, thebest solution for reporting is the one that comes bundled with the turnkey product offering. To this point, rich media streams thatsynchronise audio, video, and graphics (such as PowerPoint slides or webpages) have been bundled in the proprietary formatsof the turnkey solution, making it difficult for a streaming server to track all synchronised elements.
More detail is available in the Enterprise Streaming Buyer’s Guide (which you can find elsewhere in this issue), but the three key elements of an internal solution are presenter statistics, playback statistics, and server statistics.
Presenter statistics allow presenters (or corporate training management) to determine the effectiveness of presentations, tracking viewers rates at a given moment in the live stream, on-demand viewership over a specified time period, and most-viewed segments or subsegments of a particular presentation. Playback statistics can give a glimpse into activity during viewing, such as whether or not a viewer interacted with chats, polls, and quizzes.
Server statistics include peak activity and usage trends, which is important information to have when making decisions about the use of external CDNs.