While 2020 may end up being remembered for the online meeting revolution spearheaded by the Teams vs Zoom dichotomy, a quieter but no less profound shift has been taking place across a range of niche communications platforms. The overnight ubiquity of video in business communications has unlocked new levels of comfort and user expectation for webcam use, in verticals from retail to medical to education.
We spoke to Jason Martin, President and CEO at iotum, creators of Callbridge, to better understand this phenomenon as the world finds its way through the new reality.
“There are many new opportunities now, because there are varied types of interactions that are becoming critical for people to keep the economy moving. The service bureaux of the world must keep operating — the clinics, the schools, all of these things are still under-exploited and underserved. Instead of being constrained to provide online meetings, Callbridge can be used as a programmable voice and video service with APIs adaptable to people’s core platforms. Customers can use video to service their market in different ways.”
Video: on demand, and everywhere
Consumer expectations are increasingly driven by their smartphone experiences, and want immediate access to video everywhere. But for many providers this is a huge investment, and it makes more sense to buy than build.
Phone.com (providers of UCaaS to a large number of US-based SMEs) partnered with Callbridge over a year ago, back in the ‘BC’ (‘Before COVID’) days. They recognised the value of subcontracting for specialist expertise. They leveraged iotum for dedicated DevOps resourcing to continually support compliant and effective WebRTC provision across global markets. It made more sense than developing their own video product in-house — not least the security expertise required to support GDPR and HIPAA compliance. As Senior VP and Chief Compliance Officer, Joel Maloff, stated in a recent webcast, “Callbridge enables us to compete — and we’ve been able to win business because of that.”
What Martin is predicting, and we are already seeing, is an explosion of needs-driven, accessible video insertion. “Less conferencing, more purpose-oriented video. Programmable voice and video, where the UX, data, and privacy functionality is under the control of the user and seamlessly part of the platform, thanks to the Callbridge API and SDK.”
Phone.com and iotum have developed a strong working partnership and ongoing dialogue. Maloff described the two companies communicating via a second shared Slack channel between Phones.com and iotum. The collaboration is an ongoing conversation about feature requests and future developments. This enables the developers at iotum to learn about user needs directly from the grassroots, and Phones.com to deliver a better and more specialised service to their users with every release. Said Martin:
“With Callbridge’s Programmable Video API, new types of video-enabled services are now limited only by imagination”
A world rich in video opportunity
And of course, as Martin reflected, there are still underserved markets for plain vanilla group calling, where big players are not presently directing their attention. “Africa, for example, doesn’t have a preferred collaboration solution. They’re definitely not Teams, or Zoom, or Cisco addicted yet! So there’s still plenty of opportunities for people to white label and promote their own solutions there, and we’re enabling the point of presence to support that.”
So the future for niche partnerships and collaborations still looks ripe for innovation and extension — bringing connection and communication, the human touch of voice and video, to every point of interaction. If you can imagine it, Callbridge can deliver it.
Discover Callbridge’s video integration potential here.
More on Callbridge from iotum
WATCH: Powering Partners with HD Video
UC Today’s Rob Scott hosts Jason Martin, CEO of iotum, Joel Maloff, SVP of Strategic Alliances at Phone.com and Harsh Ruparel, VP & COO We Conference.
In this session, we discuss how iotum’s Callbridge is enabling global partners to win with HD video conferencing.
Also within this session, we discuss:
- What’s the state of the market right now, how do partners tackle Microsoft Teams and Zoom?
- How does a channel partner build video conferencing into their stack?
- How can you differentiate?
