LifeSize’s Andreas Wienold, Vice President International (APAC & EMEA) and Deepak Braganza,Country Manager, India & South Asia, talk to Pankaj Maru about the company’s strategy and approach in the Indian market, and the latest trends in the communication collaboration space. Excerpts…
Andreas Wienold: Let me talk in general. For us, the focus is always going to be users. It’s very simple,if people use our equipment and they like it more, then they will use it more and will talk about it to other people. So a lot of investment that we are making is in the user experience on video quality, the ease of use, ease of handling the equipment and in making calls. And this is how we win most of our customers and that’s why we don’t compete on data sheets. We get our customer to play with it, our end points are infrastructure, we don’t believe in power points and don’t believe in other people’s power points. We allow customers to look at our solutions and let them test it before buying, which is different from our competitors which try to sell using PDFs and Powerpoint presentations. Given the tough economic scenario, people are unwilling to spend money and look for value and scalability. Scalability gives us a complete different stand today amongst our competitors.
What are the potential sectors where your products are seeing adoption and what is the market approach?
Andreas Wienold: For LifeSize, the solutions do not have limitations. From a small lawyer to a large enterprise, we can help them as much as we can use the large enterprise. We can help enterprises of all sizes, small sized to larger enterprises which could be in public sector or education sector. We can set up a platform for interaction in a classroom setup which can be recorded and made available to video stream to train pupils at home. The government sector including state, center and defence are also huge verticals for us. On the corporate front, we focus on the upper end of the mid-market as we have a lot of customers and these are fortune 500 customers. Our services are affordable and are easily accessible when it comes to usage in this competitive market. There are plenty of mid-sized and arger enterprises which often come to us and in India, there are plenty of such enterprises. Today, most of the businesses are global, for instance in Bangalore, most of the IT centers have international reach.
Deepak Braganza: In India we are seeing success across all vertical so we are present in large enterprises as well as SMBs. Education sector is picking up slowly, and we have made some good progress in education, and also recently bagged some good projects in healthcare. So we can say all verticals are going well and working for us. Its more about the power of the UVC platform, the flexibility and simplicity that drives it and customers actually look for a consultative approach rather then presenting just a box like – ‘this is my box with the product, take it or leave it.’ We understand the requirements of customers and take the solution and that is what differentiates us. Consultative approach is more effective today rather then presenting a box and fight over the price. I think this consultative approach is helping us gain so much of the market share gradually.
Andreas Wienold: We have amazing partners and our partner network is through out the country which adds value. When we make our box available to them, they really know our solution – how they need to integrate it in the meeting room, in the unified communications environment, integrating the network and so on. We are different from our competition. We are independent, we might have been known to be a division of ogitech but we are very separate division of Logitech. While there are a lot of synergies we can leverage day to day, we have the ability to go out and do what’s right for the customer. Some of the competitors have been acquired by larger companies and they have kind of a bag pack of other things, which they need to position too. One of our competitors would obviously love to upgrade their network as they talk about video, another competitor would not easily integrate with other people’s UC solutions because its not its own. So our independence, combined with the need and ability, always have made us work as per the scenario of customers.
In a new role as LifeSize’s vice president for International markets what kind of expectations do you have from the Indian team and what are your plans for the company?
Andreas Wienold: I don’t look for a huge change, what I am looking is a team that is customer centric and develop deals with moral and loyalty for long term customer relationship. We have customers who have been buying for the last 6-7 years and buy even today, so we want long term customer relationship as customers are the main part and parcel for a business organization. We want a strong customer and a partner base for growth. We need to come up with customer solutions and not with a big box and we have a consulting approach towards customers.
Are there any plans to ramp up headcount, investment as well as channel partners in India?
Andreas Wienold: We have a research and development center here in Bangalore and if we look at it from a distance, its one of the fastest growing organization and more and more of our key objects and software platforms are done in Bangalore. From a market perspective, we will always invest where we see the returns. Our model is scalability but we don’t need a lot of people for scalability however, what we need is right kind of people with right skill sets for making right solutions. Our team in India, currently is of right size and more number of people are working here in India than Germany.
Lifesize is third after Cisco and Polycom so any plans to change the market position and which are the areas of improvement?
Andreas Wienold: We care more about the untapped markets, though fighting for shares in the existing markets is important. We have grown from zero and now we are on third spot. We need to be clever on how to convince people to use video who haven’t used it before. The industry has never offered the people an answer to it, because it was overpriced. But we defined the ways, accepted the market segment and came forth with affordable video solutions and its effects will be seen in the future. We can grow even more through communication, through market segmentation by putting right business we can even grow more.
What’s the key proposition that can take your company and its products ahead in the market?
Andreas Wienold: Our combination is user experience and cost. If you get this right, you can scale up. Mostly, our initial deals are not in 100 units but it is 5, 10 or 15 and if the customer does not get a good experience, they will just buy 5 or 15 units but if the experience is good they would come back for more and you can scale up. This is where, we really position ourselves well. Get the best technology, roll out the best design and solution that works in any location, any office and at a cost effective rate – this is our key proposition.
What kinds of trends are emerging in communication collaboration space with the advent of cloud and mobility?
Andreas Wienold: It’s difficult to say because we are in middle of everything, which makes our industry interesting, whether it be cloud, mobility or so on. We have virtualized our product as a cloud offering and mobility is huge. I think this will be the one big thing we will see in India. Once LTE gets rolled out here, you will get almost unlimited mobile bandwidth, lot of people at airports or in home will be seen using these devices to make HD video call. And on the mobility side, we are far more advanced compared to the competitors. And we are successful because we can extend our solutions onto specific devices, cover a wide range of devices and no vendor covers more devices than we do. This is going to be a new trend in India. We will see people making video calls within the cities and people in the same city will connect through video conferencing or calls considering the traffic issues in cities.
Deepak Braganza: From the latest 3G analysis, a maximum number of users are watching YouTube. Also India has over takenJapan on the number of smart phones devices. Local vendors have brought the price point to low-level for mass market. Our approach is device agnostic but to concentrate on the platform and we are betting big on LTE because video wouldn’t be purely an enterprise thing and we will see videos will entering home of these enterprise people.