vendor focus LifeSize
Video conferencing for every budget LifeSize CEO Colin Buechler was in Dubai recently to attend the company’s annual EMEA partner conference. He spoke to us about his company’s go-to-market strategy and what sets it apart from competitors.
Colin Buechler, CEO, LifeSize
What is LifeSize’s unique value proposition? LifeSize is the innovation leader in video conferencing. We were actually the pioneer that created high definition video communications. We first launched our first product in 2005, so we’ve been shipping for seven years. We operate
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Reseller Middle East
october 2012
in 80 countries around the world with tens of thousands of customers. Much of the industry-firsts have come out of LifeSize. We have been defining where the industry has been going since inception. As well as being the first to launch HD video conferencing, we were also the first to launch it for under $5000, so we brought price
performance to the industry. Our vision is to provide high quality video communication to anyone, anywhere. We wanted to make video conferencing mainstream, rather than just in the largest boardrooms in the largest companies in the world. To do that you have to create a flexible architecture that can be accessible to any company of any size. One great example is we were the first company to provide one button push streaming, recording and archiving, so not only can you collaborate in high definition, but you can record that with just one button push and then you can stream that out to thousands of participants and then archive that to provide either on-demand or live. We continue to provide those types of innovations around ease and simplicity. We’re usually not looking where we are but where we’re going. We saw mobility being an explosion in our industry. It went from something that was interesting and nice to have about a year and a half ago, to being mandatory in almost every deal that we look at, which has really been driven by tablets, specifically the iPad and increasingly Android devices. So we saw this trend happening and about a year and a half ago we bought a company called Mirial out of Milan, Italy, that was the leading provider of mobile high definition video communication that support the broadest array of mobile devices, both iOS and Android devices, in the world. Another great example of innovation from LifeSize is our virtualised infrastructure. We defined this incredible high quality video collaboration, but it was connected to almost arcane and backwards-facing infrastructure. Our industry has been very slow to adopt technologies that have been evident in many other IT stacks. Some of us don’t necessarily come from the video conferencing industry. My Head of Products and I both come from Dell and so when we looked at infrastructure, we didn’t want to build what other people build, that’s not what LifeSize does. We try to redefine it in a way that we believe customers can take advantage of. We did the same thing with infrastructure so instead of building products that our competitors had, we built a very flexible infrastructure that we call our Universal Video Collaboration (UVC) platform, which was the industry’s first virtualised infrastructure platform.