Development and Beyond: The True Cost of Fragmented Video Solutions

Modular video solutions promise flexibility. You choose the tools—analytics engines, storage layers, cloud infrastructure—and tie them together under your own framework. At first, it seems like control. But over time, that control comes at a cost. Development slows down. Maintenance becomes constant. Scaling introduces more risk than reward. The longer a fragmented system runs, the more time teams spend managing infrastructure instead of improving it.

This article breaks down those hidden costs—development, integration, IT overhead, long-term scalability—and shows how Nx EVOS, the Enterprise Video Operating System from Network Optix, is purpose-built to eliminate them.

Development Costs: Integration Work Disguised as Progress

In fragmented systems like NVIDIA VST, developers don’t just build features—they have to spend time wiring components together. Ingestion pipelines, analytics frameworks, storage connectors, user interfaces—each maintained separately, often with their own SDKs, APIs, and versioning. When these dependencies change, functionality breaks. When features are requested, development time expands—not because the features are complex, but because the environment they live in is. Fixing this customization with third-party integrations can cost anywhere from $25,000 to over $100,000 in development depending on the complexity and number of components involved according to a study done by Cubix.

Nx EVOS eliminates this friction. As a fully unified platform, it provides built-in support for AI-native processing through Nx AI Manager, multi-site infrastructure managed under a single Organization layer, flexible deployment across on-prem, edge, and cloud environments, and hardware agnosticism for broad compatibility. And while Nx EVOS is end-to-end, it remains flexible, offering open APIs, SDKs, and tools that make it easy to customize the desktop client and integrate seamlessly with third-party applications and devices.  Developers build directly on top of a tightly integrated stack—with no need for glue code or workaround engineering.

Maintenance Costs: Constant Patching and Troubleshooting 

Fragmented systems are rarely synchronized. Different modules update on different schedules, introducing frequent regressions. IT teams are pulled into recurring troubleshooting loops—testing how a storage update might affect analytics behavior or why one AI model works on one site but fails on another. The more third-party components involved, the more potential points of failure, and maintenance alone can already account for up to 20% of a systems total ownership cost over time for fragmented or aging deployments according to SecurityInformed.

With Nx EVOS, updates are rolled out as a single, tested release. Each component - cloud, desktop, server, Nx AI Manager, etc. - is version-aligned, reducing the risk of cross-component failures and eliminating the need for constant revalidation.

Scaling Costs: Complexity Multiplies with Every Deployment

Adding functionality to a modular system often means repeating the same work—another integration, another configuration, another testing cycle. What starts as manageable quickly becomes unsustainable. A single-site deployment with 20 devices may be feasible. But replicate that across 20 locations, and you’re managing a fragmented ecosystem with no centralized control, inconsistent performance, and escalating infrastructure costs. 

Nx EVOS enables scaling without fragmentation. Its architecture allows sites to be grouped into Organizations for centralized management of users, layouts, permissions, and system behavior. AI models can be deployed at scale via Nx AI Manager, enabling uniform configuration across diverse edge and server environments. System expansion is simplified, with no need to reconfigure or duplicate integration work. The result is a platform that grows with your operation—without growing in complexity.

The True Cost: A Comparative Analysis