The Argument for SaaS for IP Cameras.

and why today is a great time to be an app developer.

At Trim, we conduct Product Design Sprints as the kickoff exercise in our application development process. We are tasked, in some cases, to dive into spaces that are historically — messy — to see if time, technology, and/or community have made progress in addressing un-disrupted verticals.

When our newest startup client approached us with a novel solution in an untouched product category, we were excited to jump into some streaming video research to better understand what opportunities exist at the software layer to build apps with. Our results, overall, were pretty conclusive: this is an area that is still, well, messy. With the largest IP Camera manufacturer commanding a whopping 6% market share, to say that hardware is fragmented is an understatement. This fragmentation lends to very little software opportunity, as company’s move further away from global continuity with this technology. Our Product Design Sprint could have had us mapping out a much more complicated system had it not been for the discovery of a little service called Evercam.

Evercam.io is an API that connects “any IP camera” to a software layer that a team like ours can do amazing things with. By segmenting the hardware fully from the software, we are able to focus on doing what we do best.

It’s discoveries like these that solidify the hope that I have for application development and the open source community as a whole. Kudos to the Evercam team for not only identifying a problem worth solving, but showing the commitment to solving it in a massively fragmented industry. As for the integration itself, I will follow up after our sprint :)