Dell Expands TelePresence Market
If you want to know when a high-tech market is reaching its tipping point, keep a close eye on Dell Inc. Generally speaking, Dell only jumps into high-volume, mass market opportunities. So the company’s decision to offer TelePresence solutions — designed by LifeSize Communications — is worth watching. Here’s why.
LifeSize is a small but fast-growing player in the TelePresence space. Generally speaking, the company’s next-generation video conferencing systems serve small and midsize businesses, government, financial, education, and healthcare customers.
While TelePresence systems from Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard can cost $250,000 or more per executive suite, LifeSize’s solutions start at less than $5,000.
The VAR Guy is not suggesting that LifeSize’s $5,000 solution is anything like the far more sophisticated offerings from Cisco and HP. However, aggressive pricing and entry-level solutions will certainly help to grow the overall market for TelePresence, as The VAR Guy pointed out last year.
And in early May 2008, The VAR Guy pointed out that TelePresence was nearing its tipping point.
Seeing the Bigger Picture
That’s where Dell — and Tech Data — enter the picture. Both companies have signed on to resell/distribute LifeSize, notes Dan Sibille, the head of partner channels for LifeSize.
Dell’s move is particularly interesting, since the company typically does not promote bleeding-edge technology. Instead, Dell waits on the sidelines for a technology to reach critical mass, and then jumps into an industry to cash in on volume sales.
Apparently, Dell’s mass market strategy is evolving. Over the past year, the company has introduced open source IP PBXes (from Fonality), consumer PCs with Ubuntu Linux preinstalled, and now TelePresence offerings from LifeSize.
By partnering with niche companies, Dell is able to test emerging markets right when they seem to be nearing their tipping point. TelePresence, The VAR Guy believes, is the latest example of that strategy.
VAR Guy
In response to your excellent blog regarding the latest Dell – LifeSize partnership, we would like to add the following comments and information to your perspective:
2. You are right, the times Have Changed in the videoconferencing industry. Because of the ongoing cost of doing business and meeting face to face, telepresence and videoconferencing have become a necessity – not a luxury. However, what is not widely known is that videoconferencing including telepresence is now affordable, with a few companies offering product rentals and managed services that fit any budget. This allows companies that don’t want to make a capital investment and/or don’t want to have IT personnel manage it, the capability to use a convenient outside resource to do it for them. Fortunately, utilizing managed services allows the company to avoid increasing their personnel and infrastructure cost at a fraction of an IT person’s annual salary.
3. LifeSize HD Products. Many of the high definition products on the market today are being compared as “equal” when that is not the case at all. Most are not “original” high definition products – instead they are standard definition products that have been upgraded utilizing software to simulate and “look” as if they are HD. Even the Telepresence products of Cisco and HP are not necessarily better in terms of resolution and frame rate – they just charge you an arm and a leg for the rest of the set-up stuff (ie. Lights, walls, etc…) The true fact of the matter is that these telepresence products are bandwidth hogs and cost the end user more over the life of the product then the LifeSize with little appreciable difference in pure video/audio quality.
4. The Face to Face Live, Inc. Solution. Face to Face Live (www.f2fl.com) provides excellent affordable HD video conferencing and managed service products that fit into any budget. Dell might simply sell VC equipment along with their other products, but what they don’t offer is managed service. That is where Face to Face Live comes in. We handle all the service needed with VC so that the end client doesn’t have to. We believe that this is the future of the industry.
Face to Face Live was founded in Scottsdale, AZ in 2006 by Al Smith, an executive from the computer leasing industry who repeatedly saw a need for a videoconferencing “solution” that performed to his expectations. Al encountered companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on videoconferencing equipment that simply did not work. Face to Face Live researched and has put together the best equipment and managed services based round the award winning LifeSize’s (www.lifesize.com), the “Videoconferencing Company of the Year” for 2007, products.
The future of the video conferencing industry is affordable HD technology that allows for companies to reduce their carbon footprint, decrease travel costs to budgets, and increase employee productivity.
Derek: Thanks for bolstering The VAR Guy’s ego with the thoughtful post. The VAR Guy certainly can’t endorse any particular telepresence products — yours, others — because he hasn’t tested the systems. But it’s good to see additional solutions coming to market.