Organisations are being discouraged from rolling out video conferencing to many meeting rooms by the costs of annual room licencing from the likes of Zoom.
In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Michael Helmbrecht, chief operating officer of Lifesize, said that Zoom Rooms’ annual room licensing and interop costs, which he called the “Zoom tax”, were having a significant impact on budgets and the number of meeting rooms that can be fully outfitted for video.
“It just doesn’t make economic sense for those enterprises that need to communicate and collaborate more effectively, not just within their own teams but with their external partners,” he said.
He commented on the costs of fitting out meeting rooms as his company launches its Lifesize Dash meeting room kit software solution. It has also released an updated tablet-based Lifesize Room Controller application for Dash and expanded Dash compatibility with PC-based meeting room kit solutions. This enables customers to repurpose existing hardware investments and migrate to Lifesize without incurring additional costs, according to the company.
He said that the Dash room kit software solution can be implemented by customers – even on an experimental basis – at no cost and without hidden interoperability fees.
Each free Dash license enables organisations to register one meeting room to the Lifesize cloud service, supporting scheduled or instantaneous group video calls with up to 25 participants. Organisations can implement Lifesize Dash on Chromebox or Windows PC-based meeting room kit devices with support for Mac room kits coming in 2020.
“Our video conferencing service as a whole leverages WebRTC, SIP and H.323 to ensure the broadest interoperability without customers needing to pay for extra connector software,”
Helmbrecht added that these products update automatically, which means considerably less maintenance and management time and overhead costs for IT teams at larger organisations with dozens of meeting rooms spanning multiple facilities.
He said that by removing the cost and scale constraints of room kits and video communication, thus allowing for more virtual meeting participation, “the proliferation of cross-team interactions and collaboration can only lead to better business decisions.”
Ira M. Weinstein, managing partner at analyst firm Recon Research, said that Lifesize has addressed several longstanding barriers to adoption, such as cost, compatibility and ease of use.
“The free meeting room software license is especially interesting. Many providers offer freemium models for personal conferencing, but freemium for meeting room video conferencing takes things to the next level”
“Lifesize continues to challenge the status quo, and its users (including the folks at Recon Research) reap the benefit,” he added.
Lifesize has also launched a new Room Controller app that can be used together with Dash and an Android or Apple room kit tablet to enable camera controls, as well as featuring at-a-glance integrated calendar views, one-touch join for meetings and access to collaboration features. This means that users can rely on only the Room Controller app and Dash to facilitate their meetings, instead of using their laptops.
