Video collaboration and meeting productivity solutions provider Lifesize, has launched its new Rooms-as-a-Service offering to help customers use video conferencing facilities at a more predictable price and with lower initial costs.
The offering is available immediately to customers in the United States and Europe with more expansive international availability planned for 2020. Organisations can deploy end-to-end video collaboration solutions in meeting rooms starting from $99 per room per month.
Through Lifesize Rooms-as-a-Service, customers can get started with Lifesize’s all-in-one meeting room solutions via a simple subscription offering, with meeting room hardware, cloud service, maintenance and support provided for a fixed, predictable price. The company claimed that customers would see a 20 to 30 per cent lower total cost of ownership in their first two years of service.
Customers will have a choice of multiple room system configurations and payment options based on contract length.
In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Michael Helmbrecht, chief operating officer for Lifesize, said the new service was a bridge between the free room service it offers to customers with their own equipment and their 4K monitor systems that they sold with maintenance contracts that included monitoring, software updates, interoperability and phone support.
“In the middle, what we saw was there are customers who have been reluctant to buy because they’ve come from more of a web conferencing mindset, and they’re not sure where they’re going to go. They have three or four solutions across voice and video and content,” he said.
Hesitation in the market
Helmbrecht added that there is a freezing effect that happens in the market, a tactic deployed by the likes of Cisco and Microsoft, that makes customers hesitate about what conferencing solution they will go with.
Additionally, another driver for this new offering was customers moves from CapEX to OpEX with subscribing to services instead of running their own infrastructure. Customers wanted more flexibility and to own as few assets as possible.
“That’s where we developed our rooms-as-a-service offering that we just launched to fill that void”
Helmbrecht said that he has seen through partners plenty of leasing-based offerings of , three to five year contracts where customers are paying monthly on a much larger commitment over a period of time. “They’re not as flexible and that’s how traditional leasing tends to work.”
“Rooms as a service is different. It’s about minimising perceived risk and flexibility for the customer. It’s really a rental model, the customer never owns the asset. They’re subscribing to the systems that go in their conference rooms, just like they would to the software and service for their users on their laptops or their phones or their tablets. They’re renting it from Lifesize and our partners and we’re providing the service on them,” he added.
“They’re getting exactly the same experience; hardware, software service, warranty support, everything monitoring, but they would get if they owned it and bought a subscription to a service plan”
“They’re getting all wrapped into this one subscription effectively.”
