Business Info - issue 141

01732 759725 33 magazine COLLABORATION It’s been a busy few months for the fast-growing video meeting and collaboration company Lifesize, a provider of complete end-to-end, cloud-based video conferencing solutions encompassing hardware, software and services. At the end of 2018, it announced a new 4K global cloud service architecture, before, earlier this year, introducing a range of 4K-capable Icon meeting room systems for smaller huddle rooms, mid-sized meeting spaces and conference rooms. In June, Lifesize made another eye-catching announcement with the introduction of a freemium service, Lifesize GO, to give individuals and businesses of all sizes a new way to experience Lifesize video, audio and web conferencing. Suitable for meetings of up to eight people, the free Lifesize GO service is a browser-based solution for PC, Mac and iOS/Android tablets and smartphones that requires no software installation – to join a meeting, invitees just click on a link. Yet, it still provides key features of the paid-for product, like video, audio and content encryption. Recent developments such as these are likely to give a further boost to a company that has enjoyed an 80% compound annual growth rate in annual Ready, steady, GO recurring revenue over the last four years. In 2018 alone Lifesize saw a 62% year-on-year increase in enterprise customers and the addition of several hundred new partners. Today, Lifesize has an annual turnover of more than $100 million, split between hardware sales and, increasingly, services. Two years ago, the ratio of hardware sales to service revenue was 60:40. At the end of 2018, it was 50:50 and by the end of this year it is likely to be 40:60. Huge opportunity Michael Helmbrecht, Chief Product/ Operating Officer at Lifesize, says that despite the company’s rapid growth, there is still a huge and growing market for Lifesize to go after, particularly amongst users of rival solutions. “We have tremendous growth opportunity,” he said. “It’s really just a question of how rapidly we can build awareness of our brand and generate opportunities for our salesforce and our partners. There are no structural barriers to growth. “As the market changes, the people with the greatest share, for example CiscoWebex, are haemorrhaging customers. There’s $2 billion in recurring service revenue just between Cisco Webex and GoToMeeting. Yet, most of the people who use those services have used them for a long time and aren’t particularly fond of them. That creates a great on-going opportunity for us.” Helmbrecht points out that while almost all organisations have some experience of video conferencing, most have been dissatisfied with its quality, ease of use, cost and ability to scale. He cites all of these as major strengths of Lifesize’s cloud-based service, particularly its scalability. “We really have changed that value proposition in a way that makes it very cost-effective to scale an extremely high-quality service across a customer’s locations worldwide, without the need for them to add people to manage it. That extraordinarily low cost of ownership is one of the differentiators that allows us to grow,” he said. Helmbrecht adds that the strengths of the Lifesize proposition, including its range of all-in-one camera units with integrated processing and separate speakerphones, mean that once Lifesize is in front of a customer it has a very high win rate. “We are very proud of our system holistically: the service, the hardware, the software.When we get to the point where a customer will let us (or us with one of our partners) demonstrate on site, we see win rates as high as 80%. “Most of our competitors don’t do that and instead try to take customers to a corporate facility. The fact that we are able to go to someone’s site and demonstrate the system or give them the equipment and software licences so they can do it themselves across multiple sites shows a level of confidence in the ease of use and ease of management of our technology that very few of our competitors will attempt,” he said. Ease of use Lifesize is able to do this, suggests Helmbrecht, because ease of use has always been an incredibly important quality for Lifesize and the focus of Michael Helmbrecht While almost all organisations have some experience of video conferencing, most have been dissatisfied with its quality, ease of use, cost and ability to scale Continued... If you haven’t already enhanced your communications with video, GO could be just what you are looking for. James Goulding finds out more from Lifesize Chief Product/Operating Officer Michael Helmbrecht Lifesize GO ISSUE 141