Hi, my name is _________ and I’m the ___________ here at Lifesize. Thank you for your time today to hear a little more about what Lifesize has been up to the last year or so and what we’ve just recently introduced into the marketplace.
I thought I’d give you a quick overview of who we are and what we’ve done over the past couple of years, and then get right into the product section.
Just a brief background of who we are and where we are today.
Lifesize was founded in 2003 and we hold our headquarters in Austin, TX.
In 2009, when our company was on the height of explosion, as was the industry, Logitech acquired us.
We are absolutely a global company. We are deployed in over 100 countries, we have over 15,000 customers and 1,800 resellers.
As you can, we’ve acquired many customers over the years and they really span all industries. We’re beginning to really see, and have seen for the past several years, the proliferation of video conferencing in and amongst different companies, not just the traditional education and healthcare. Part of that has been because Lifesize has been driven to provide affordable and scalable solutions from the smallest companies to the largest. And as you can see, there are some great company logos here, many that you’re familiar with: Ebay, PayPal, Twitter, LinkedIn, Square—great company names.
[Use this time to reference a relevant case study or two that will help tie in our solution to the customer need]
Example: “The beautiful thing is, the technology that these larger companies are using is exactly the same technology that a small business is using from Lifesize. For example, we work with a company called Track Maven who is one of our customers out of Washington DC. They are a small shop; they have 25 employees. They use the technology to not only have daily and weekly meetings with each other but they have the ability to appear as a much larger company because they use video conferencing to talk to their clients. They don’t come off looking like the small business that they are because they’re using great, brilliant technology to really grow and expand their marketplace through the utilization of Lifesize. This is a great slide for you to get an idea of how expansive video has become. Our niche is everyone from large to small but they all use the same technology that you would be using.”
When you choose to partner with Lifesize, you join an outstanding group of organizations that span every business sector from technology to health care. And we have years of experience in helping businesses do more over video than they ever thought possible.
One of the other things that has happened in our history at Lifesize is that we have remained very focused on innovation. Back in 2005, we launched the first HD video conferencing endpoint anywhere. We believed that there was a better way to see video technology and that we could do it in HD. Since that time, we have continued to deploy and innovate, bringing to market the first flexible software infrastructure, being available on VM and hyperV and now with the newest introduction of Lifesize Cloud, the world’s first SAAS-based video technology. You can see that innovation really remains at the core of our DNA. We believe we are the pioneers in the industry, and we are continually advancing the next wave of future video technologies.
Additional notes:
Lifesize has a history of relentless innovation, shown through the championing of trends in simplified user experiences and aggressively delivering greater performance at lower prices. Lifesize has a proven track record of developing tools that are as easy to use as pushing a button and technology that enables superior collaboration rather than frustrating you and getting in the way of true face-to-face communication.
2005 – First business-class HD video system in the world
2009 – First HD video system for under $5,000 / First 1080p video system
2010 – First single-button streaming, recording and auto-publishing solution
2011 – First integrated, virtualized video infrastructure platform
2012 – First virtualized, software-based MCU for video collaboration / First touch-screen phone optimized for HD video collaboration / First all-in-one video conferencing solution, installed in minutes
2013 – Introduced the “Smart Video” experience, coupling feature-rich video applications powered by an integrated infrastructure & endpoint relationship
2014 – First to deliver a truly “connected experience” across any device, in the cloud or on-prem, instant or scheduled / Transformation of Lifesize, new brand identity, new look/feel
What is driving us to where we are today? A lot of it is what is going on all around us. The consumerization and use of video conferencing is exploding. Think about Skype, Google Hangouts, and Face Time.
[Use this time to talk about how video has become a part of your everyday life, or the positives it could have had on you growing up.]
Example: Think about, if you have kids, how they interact with their grandparents. Mine, for example, do it on Skype almost every weekend, and that’s just what they grew up with.
Because of that, video is becoming much more prevalent at the consumer level and is penetrating into what is happening in the business environment.
But then we also look at what is happening with businesses in general. They are becoming much more geographically disbursed. You see it when workforces are trying to acquire the best talent and sometimes that means that you have to hire people that aren’t located near HQ. In order to do that, you need to find different technologies that can accommodate that talent.
You also have teleworkers, people are working from home at a much higher rate than they have in the past.
And then you have extended teams. I know personally, my team is very dependent on collaborating with vendors and outside contractors. I have to find a way to bring them into our team environment with weekly meetings and daily calls. Doing so on video has made it a much more collaborative environment than just relying on old school traditional technologies.
Also what’s happening is that businesses are expecting real time access to almost everything, whether it’s information, a visible conversation, or a communications technology in general. It has to be mobile, it hast to be always on, and the quality has to be far superior to anything else.
These changes and driving forces aren’t unique to Lifesize. The market demands are changing and it’s exploding into what’s happening at the business level.
Here are a few examples of company logos that you may or may not be familiar with. They’re basically taking technologies that traditionally would have been delivered to you on a very big server or box at your office and they’re now being deployed in the cloud.
[Use this time to talk about your interaction with cloud technology on a personal level]
Example: Personally for me, I take a lot of photos of my children and I used to be very dependent on always having to save them on an external hard drive. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve done that. Almost all my photos are in the cloud now whether it’s though Dropbox or iCloud, everything is saved up in the cloud.
Why? For the very same reasons why businesses have chosen to do it. It was more scalable, it was much more cost effective, it was flexible, I didn’t have to be a technology genius to figure it out, and it was easy to adopt. And it’s these same driving forces that are really allowing video to advance.
We knew for video, change had to come. Partly because there was limited adoption of on-premise infrastructure. The systems were extremely expensive, and many of them continue to be very expensive, and businesses needed alternatives. We’ve heard it time and time again, “We’re done with complex set ups, we don’t have the time for it, it’s costing us too much in time and resources, and I don’t have a dedicated IT team to really allocate their efforts to just this particular effort.”
Change had to come and it is coming. Now anywhere, anytime, any device--I can make a video call. It’s affordable and most of all, it’s intuitive and independent of IT.
When you’re searching for a video solution, you realize there are quite a few different offerings that compete in this space.
Traditional On-Premise- these two logos are probably familiar to many of you in this room: Cisco and Polycom. When you look at their solutions, they’re on-premise, they have bulky video conferencing endpoints, they’re expensive, and they just don’t scale.
Then you move over to Web Conferencing. That might be a solution that somebody may have considered, or maybe they already have it in place. Well, there’s no conference room that’s being connected into the WebEx or Go-to-Meeting model. It’s all at the individual level. It’s a Meet-Me only model where multiple people can come together to meet, but predominately all on audio and it’s inefficient.
Then you look at the third model, “Meet-Me” Cloud Video. That bridges a lot of different video endpoints together, but similar to web conferencing, it’s not connecting the conference room. It’s focused on individual users through a video bridge. Think of it as the same thing as an audio conference call, but through video endpoints. It’s Meet-Me only which means you have to setup a room that everyone dials in to meet, it’s not scalable, and it’s not very effective.
Then you’ve got free video services. Most of us are absolutely familiar with Skype or Hangouts and we always get asked the question, “Why do I need business-class service when I can just get Skype for free?” The reality is, the easiest answer here is that there’s no way I would allow my business to be dependent on free and non business-class services for any other application, so why would you allow it for video. Think about your accounting software--you’re not going to go out and get a free service to run your business for all your payments and invoices, you’re going to buy a business-class service. It simply doesn’t have security, it doesn’t scale, and there’s no guaranteed service level associated with it.
And last you have audio calls. We realize that a lot of you are still making audio calls. It’s not only so 80’s but we all know what happens when you’re on an audio call. I’m multitasking. I’m browsing the internet. I might even be buying something on the internet. Regardless of what I’m doing, I know that audio is not very effective for having productive meetings. Yet, we know that businesses use it every day.
Companies were still searching for the right solution to hit all of their needs, and today we have the opportunity to introduce all of you to Lifesize cloud. It’s the first and only connected device and cloud infrastructure offering for businesses.
What does all that mean? I’ll explain:
Think about how your business is constructed today. You’ve got boardrooms, huddle rooms, conference rooms, and obviously you’ve got a lot of employees at work at their individual desks. Well that’s great and typically you might see an endpoint or two in any of those scenarios. The problem though is that the only people who are truly able to engage in that boardroom or conference room scenario were those sitting in the room. It prohibited all these people over here, teleworkers, the person that’s driving in their car right now, the business traveler and mobile workers, and my guests, who may not be a part of my company directory, but who I’m dependent on and I need to have active communications with. I was never able to bridge them into those meetings that were happening in the conference room or at least not bring them in very effectively.
What we set out to do was to bridge everyone together through the introduction of Lifesize Cloud, our technology that brings endpoints and connects them to all of the users regardless of where they are and what device they’re on.
So what does that look like from a product perspective?
Right here you have endpoints like you traditionally would see in your conference rooms or huddle rooms, and we’re able to connect them through Lifesize Cloud to users on their laptop, tablet devices like iPads, and any of my mobile devices. We work on all iOS, Android, PC or Mac environments--you name it, we’re on it. It allows me to connect all of those people we talked about earlier, my teleworkers, my guests, my mobile workers to the meetings that are happening in that conference room environment.
We’re the first and only provider that really bridges everyone together, and we call that The Connected Experience.
We are enabled to do that through a great cloud architecture and we utilize Softlayer, an IBM company, mainly because they have the absolute highest performing cloud infrastructure and fastest network speeds available anywhere. Our technology running on their backbone means you’re going to have an excellent experience on every call, every time. equals optimal and ultimate success.
Additional notes:
Lifesize Cloud runs on IBM Softlayer: the highest performing cloud infrastructure available (they claim this right on their website and I think it is spot on)
Unmatched, ultra-high speed IBM Softlayer global network helps Lifesize deliver a superior video communication experience
Lifesize Cloud architecture runs across IBM Softlayer data centers around the world for superior reliability, availability and scalability
A service built to provide a connected experience, running on a platform built to perform—that’s Lifesize Cloud, powered by IBM®. High performing systems, global availability and footprint, speed, scalability and resiliency are a few of the considerations we examined when choosing to partner with IBM, a world-class provider, to deliver the backbone of Lifesize Cloud.
It starts with a global footprint of data centers, each with up to 5,000 servers.
Leveraging best-in-class methodologies, data center performance variables are closely scrutinized and optimized: space, redundant power, high available multipath network, personnel and internal infrastructure. Data center racks are provisioned with a massive amount of bandwidth, each with 40 Gbps of connectivity, for phenomenal performance.
All data centers are fully redundant with power, cooling and network carriers.
Multiple power feeds, fiber links, backup generators and battery systems provide industry-leading reliability and give IBM the confidence of a 100% network uptime service-level agreement.
Connectivity
IBM data centers in which Lifesize Cloud operates and the global network of IBM POPs are connected by 2,000 Gbps of connectivity in a private fiber optic network. In addition, the backbone of Lifesize Cloud has direct connectivity with over 20 global carriers, including:
Comcast®
• Level 3®
• NTT™
• TeliaSonera™
• Telstra™
• ANY2™
• DE-CIX
• Equinix™
• JPNAPs
• NOTA
• NYIIX
• Telefonica™
• TIE
• Time Warner®
• RMIX
• Pacnet™
• PCCW®
• AMS-IX
• HKIX
• LINX®
• SIX
• Starhub
These carriers connect to IBM POPs with multiple 10 Gbps connections each and in many cases to multiple locations. Carrier networks connect directly to the IBM network in one or more of the following cities:
• Atlanta
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Denver
• Frankfurt
• Hong Kong
• Houston
• London
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• New York
• Palo Alto
• San Jose
• Seattle
• Singapore
• Tokyo
• Washington D.C.
At the end of the day, Lifesize provides the complete, cost effective, and efficient collaboration solution. It’s the connected experience which absolutely includes the meeting room. It’s one tool for all the ways people communicate. I can actually have five devices associated with just my profile, so I can have my laptop, my phone, my iPad, as well as possibly my endpoint if I happen to be so lucky to have one in my office, all connected to just one profile so people can reach me anywhere, anytime.
Ultimately it works the way you expect technology to work today: real-time, mobile, always-on, excellent quality, simple, flexible, and certainly without IT. Best of all, it’s easy to buy and certainly simple to manage.
Additional notes:
A connected experience — including the meeting room
Lifesize Icon room video system works right out of the box
Smartphones, laptops, tablets, guest clients, telephones
One tool for all the ways people communicate
Shared directory (prepopulated, click to call with presence status), instant and scheduled calls, single and group calls, data sharing
Works with what customers have today
25-way HD and audio for every user and meeting, 24/7
Interoperable with unlimited guest clients
Simple to buy, easy to manage
Flexible subscription plan for all sizes of teams and budgets
Starting at 25 users for $25 per month ($7,500 annually)
What Lifesize set out to do was truly create an experience where anyone using video technology would start to love their meetings. Video conferencing that is as easy and as lifelike as meeting in person is at the root of who we are as a company. We want you to have the best experience anytime that you are meeting with someone over video.
Now I’m going to transition to give you a demonstration of how all this stuff works so that you can see the intuitiveness of the user interface for yourself, play with it a bit, and start to visualize how video might work for your setup.
In closing, thanks again so much for your time. I just want to point out once again that demand for easy to use, easy to manage video conferencing is absolutely exploding. We got it, we did something about it, and we are so pleased to be the first to market with a brilliant technology that’s really redefining how businesses are going to communicate in the future. Lifesize completely reimagined the industry, we brought to market this connected experience that you’ve all just received a demonstration of, and Lifesize cloud really allows for anyone, anywhere to be connected on any device, especially the conference room, it’s our ultimate differentiator.
Thanks again for your time today, I appreciate it. I’m available for any questions you may have afterwards. Otherwise, I certainly recommend that you sign up for our free 14-day trial to check it out for yourself at your convenience. Thanks so much.
