Books and magazine articles about entrepreneurship, not to mention professors in business schools, hammer at the importance of having an exit strategy in place while building a business. Less emphasized is a corollary question, "What does an entrepreneur do after exiting a business?"

For Paul Patrick, of Cranberry, the answer became, "Start another one."

After Mr. Patrick, 46, sold his franchisee's stake in an outdoor lighting company last year, he wanted to build a different type of business, but wasn't sure what kind. But he had some clues.

"I knew I didn't want to do retail, and I knew I didn't want to do fast food," he said.

He also knew that he wanted a business that would serve other businesses, and that he wanted to make use of his technology background. After graduating form the University of Pittsburgh with a degree in information science in 1983, he had spent 20 years in information technology before launching the lighting company.

After his experience with his first business, he was sold on the franchising model as a way of getting a business off the ground. It was while searching the Internet for franchising opportunities that he learned about Dallas-based Eyesthere, a company that offers businesses the ability to monitor their work sites long-distance via the Internet. The opportunity to step into the security industry, as it is "changing with the advent of digital storage," appealed to Mr. Patrick, and just before Thanksgiving he opened the second Eyesthere franchise in the United States, in Pine.

According to El Segundo, Calif.-based electronics industry researcher iSuppli, Mr. Patrick and Eyesthere are on the front end of a coming surge in the security market: a second wave of digitization in video surveillance.

The first wave, according to an iSuppli report issued a year ago, came when digital video recorders began replacing VCRs, a shift that brought improved video quality and delivered customers from such tape-based annoyances as the need to fast-forward or rewind through an entire tape to reach a certain bit of footage, or accidentally recording over tapes.

The current wave is the move to networked video surveillance, in which a range of devices share "a fully digital and networked universe." Under this regime, all of the information can be accessed anywhere, anytime.

Or as Mr. Patrick put it, if a restaurant owner "wants to have a home life and doesn't want to be at the restaurant all the time … all you have to do is roll out of bed, hop on the computer, log on and see what's happening."

Indeed, even rolling out of bed is not necessary if one has a Web-enabled cell phone or personal digital assistant. Both live and archived video from the system can be accessed from any device that browses the Web.

Another advantage is that the system offers motion-based recording, so it does not record hours of footage in which nothing happens. More than that, the proprietary software allows "masking," a method for instructing the system not to record certain types of motion.

For instance, Mr. Patrick said, a camera trained on a parking lot might pick up the movement of trees in the background, swaying in the breeze. "That's motion that's not important and doesn't need to be recorded," he said. Masking tells the software, "This isn't important," so that it no longer records the motion.

Besides helping to boost security at work sites, the service also is presented as a means of empowering businesses in monitoring employee performance.

ISuppli projects that the sales of Internet Protocol-networked video cameras alone will grow at an annual rate of more than 100 percent a year from 2005 through 2011. That augurs well for providers of complete systems, such as Eyesthere.

Mr. Patrick's franchise was one of four that Eyesthere had available in a territory that encompasses all or part of nine counties in the Pittsburgh area: Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Greene, Lawrence, Washington and Westmoreland. He hopes to expand by picking up a second franchise within a year, and to expand his work force from three (one technician, two sales representatives) to eight or nine. Beyond that, he's prepared to share the marketplace riches.

"I'm really looking forward to the day when somebody else joins me here."