It’s safe to say that the video management software products have begun the 2.0 era. This era is all about how big the software can scale, and each year the industry will announce the new “biggest” system thus far. Included in this 2.0 era are concepts like VSaaS and virtualization, which decouples the hardware limitations from the software scalability. When the concept of video management software was being developed in the early IP camera days, the security industry was focused on the NVR, whose key function was to record networked surveillance cameras compared to the DVR, which recorded analog surveillance cameras. Over the past four years, however, the NVR and DVR have basically merged into the recording appliance product category. These devices are still hardware, rather than software-centric, and because of this they have built in hardware limitations that keep them from scaling. The merger of the NVR and DVR could be seen as a consolidation event within the market, where the blending of the products allows room for the new product segment to take over as “the next big thing.” The next big thing is the 2.0 VMS product category, which is all about scaling big.