Almost three years ago, Carnegie Mellon University Prof. Dave Andersen and I announced the Intel Science and Technology Center for Visual Cloud Systems (ISTC-VCS) at the 2016 NAB Show. Along with Prof. Kayvon Fatahalian at Stanford, Dave has led the center and collaborated closely with other academic and Intel Labs researchers to push the boundaries in visual cloud systems. We set out to study and find solutions for some of the key problems with gathering, storing and analyzing video data in large scale distributed environments. With the completion of the center now drawing near, it's time to take stock of the results and to talk of work yet to be done. The center's approach has been to bring together systems researchers and computer vision, AI and graphics researchers to create prototype systems that allow investigation of these topics.