News & Viewson Unified Communications & Collaboration

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Volume 15 Issue #19 08-October-14

Qumu Acquires Kulu Valley

Enterprise streaming platform developer Qumu this week acquired Kulu Valley in a stock-and-cash deal valued at $15 million. Kulu Valley’s 36 employees will be absorbed into Qumu’s operations and elements of the Kulu Valley solution will be integrated into the Qumu platform. Qumu also will sell a hosted version of the existing Kulu Valley solution, which will be re-named Qumu Cloud.

The Kulu Valley team will continue to work out of its London office, helping Qumu expand its footprint in the European market. Kulu Valley now has 80 corporate customers for its streaming solutions, with about two-thirds of its revenue coming from organizations based in Europe. In the year ending June 30, 2014, Kulu Valley generated $5.5 million in revenue. In each of the past two years, Kulu Valley has expanded what it calls “recurring revenue” at a compounded annual growth rate exceeding 50%.

Steve Vonder Haar, svonder@wainhouse.com

Even without the addition of Kulu Valley, Qumu is projecting that year-over-year revenues will grow 30% in 2014 over prior year levels. The company also expects its backlog of customer commitments for future software license payments to increase by the end of 2014 to levels 50% higher than in 2013.

Counting revenues from Kulu Valley, Qumu projects that 2015 revenue totals will increase by 60% in 2015 over 2014 levels. Qumu also projects that Kulu Valley will be cash flow accretive to 2015 results and that the

combined company will reach cash flow break even in 2016. Qumu expects its cash reserves to stand at between $30 million and $35 million at the end of 2014 and between $20 million and $25 million by the end of 2015. In other

Qumu news, the company announced last week the availability of its fully updated Qumu Mobile App 2.0. Version 2.0, available for iOS, Android, and Windows devices, features an enhanced user experience encompassing numerous social elements related to video collaboration and communication.

What Steve thinks: Qumu’s Kulu Valley acquisition is a bold stroke that runs somewhat counter to recent deal-making in the enterprise streaming segment. The past quarter has featured a series of transactions in which established technology vendors invested to establish a foothold in the growing market for streaming solutions. In July, Avaya purchased BurstPoint. August brought

Qumu’s Kulu Valley acquisition is a bold stroke that runs somewhat counter to recent deal-making in the enterprise streaming segment.

incremental product improvements. Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen discussed his theories of disruptive innovation in a Tuesday keynote, covering the groundswell of terms he says did not exist ten year ago: social media, smartphone, apps, Wi-Fi, Twitter, MOOC, WiKi, 3D printing, and wearables, and predicting even more change in the coming decade (well Clayton, Wi-Fi dates back to 1999 and the concept of wearables has been around for 20 years, but yes, in terms of the mainstream, you’re accurate). Here is a short rundown of some of what Alan saw or heard:

• Alcatel-Lucent — which has been a steady infrastructure player in higher education and K-12 for some years — coincidentally announced that it has successfully closed a transaction with China Huaxin Post & Telecommunication Economy Development Center for the divestment of its Enterprise division. Cash proceeds to Alcatel-Lucent total 202 million Euros. Alcatel-Lucent will maintain a 15% minority stake in a newly-formed holding company, incorporated in France. That new company, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will also continue to work with Alcatel-Lucent on a privileged business relationship basis. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will now consist of 2,700 employees operating in 80 countries. Education happens to be an eyebrow-raising whopper as a percent of revenues, they told me with specifics under NDA, but I’d already sensed that based on other end users with whom we’ve spoken. And the Enterprise business says it will continue to invest and innovate in its core markets, focusing on enterprise communications and networking — while exploring new market opportunities in select, high-

Telstra’s acquisition of Ooyala. And, in September, PGi established streaming critical mass with the purchase of TalkPoint. Each deal served as a type of streaming market validation, illustrating that large companies with an established presence in adjacent technology market segments see value in adding streaming capabilities to their broader product portfolio.

The Qumu / Kulu Valley deal tells a very different story. It’s a simple declaration by Qumu that enterprise streaming platforms still matter as stand-alone solutions and that a handful of vendors can still focus exclusively on developing end-to-end ecosystems specifically designed to address enterprise streaming issues. On paper, the product strengths of Qumu and Kulu Valley are a good fit for one another. Qumu is best known for core video content management capabilities and network administration features. Kulu Valley is strong in areas more visible to end users — most notably in content creation capabilities.

The onus is now on Qumu to blend the strengths of the solutions of the two companies into a seamless integrated platform solution. Such acquisition-driven product integration is more difficult than it sounds and will not be instantaneous.

While Qumu can immediately sell Kulu Valley’s hosted solution as a stand-alone service called Qumu Cloud, the ultimate success of Qumu’s acquisition will be determined by the speed with which it can deliver full Kulu Valley feature integration into its existing product line. Kulu Valley has a strong reputation for its embrace of open application programming interfaces — a foundation that could accelerate feature integration for Qumu. Nevertheless, the devil always is in the details. Will Qumu recognize the full fruits of the Kulu Valley acquisition in months or years? Impossible to predict now, but the clock is ticking.

Educause 2014 ToplineAlan D. Greenberg, agreenberg@wainhouse.com

Educause 2014, the largest IT and Ed tech event for the higher education community in North America, took place last week in Orlando, Florida. More than 7,000 attendees (end users and exhibitors) and hundreds of vendors were there. Big show. Not a lot of big news but Alan visited with some old and new friends on both the vendor and end user side even as many vendors talked

L-R: Gus Vasilakis, Head of North America, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise; WR’s Greenberg; Scott Hughes, CIO Moravian College;

& Neal Tilley, Education Specialist, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise

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growth countries, vertical solutions and cloud services. We briefed with the team and one of their customers, Moravian College — comments below.

• Blackboard announced the availability of a cloud version of its flagship LMS, Blackboard Learn. With the delivery of its Software-as-a-Service model (pre-announced at Blackboard World), Blackboard is now the only company to offer customers three different ways to deploy their system: locally on-site, through Blackboard’s Managed Hosting offering, or with the new SaaS / public cloud option — though the company’s focus is clearly cloud. The company also told us that The University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) has expanded its partnership with Blackboard by moving to the company’s customized learning and analytics offering via Internet2’s NET+ Solution and Services for its higher education members.

• Sonic Foundry has deepened its integration between Instructure Canvas courses and Mediasite. Content delivery from Mediasite now is achieved

through the IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) standard, providing the ability to launch My Mediasite from within Canvas. This helps faculty more easily upload video or record flipped modules, full lectures and other supporting videos, all of which are automatically published to the Canvas course. Mediasite’s viewership analytics show what video or video segments are watched by which students, helping instructors uncover potentially difficult course material that may require further clarification. Students have more flexible access to academic video and are ensured they are seeing the most recent, relevant content.

Mediasite Integration with Canvas

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• Echo360 announced the availability of the Active Learning Platform, which it had pre-announced just prior to the conference and was showing at Educause for the first time in person. Active Learning Platform is engineered to elevate student performance in the classroom and improve learning outcomes through enhanced learning analytics. Students use the Active Learning Platform to master course material with 24/7 access to content and personalized study guides. The Active Learning Platform is a pure play SaaS solution with guaranteed uptime / reliability. It leverages Echo360’s classroom capture software, personal capture software, and the SafeCapture HD hardware capture appliance, and is meant for instructors to capture everything that happens in the classroom, with sessions automatically shared with students in an HTML5 online learning environment. It includes student engagement features like integrated polls, quizzes, and other activities; content management features that let instructors more readily manage presentations, videos, and documents through an instructional content management system called the Learning Library; and learning analytics that are comprised of real-time behavioral data on class attendance and participation as well as results from quizzes and polls, lecture capture usage, time spent studying and more.

• Google announced its Google Drive for Education, an “infinitely large, ultra-secure and entirely free bookbag for the 21st century” as the company puts it. Drive for Education will be available to all Google Apps for Education customers at no charge and will include unlimited storage (with files up to 5 TB in size!), Google Apps Vault, its solution for search and discovery for compliance needs, and enhanced auditing tools and an Audit API. All free! If any

one booth was packed, it was the Google booth, where the company also had demos of Google Apps for Education and the recently announced Google Classroom, which we wrote about this summer. Not to be outdone Microsoft made a lot of noise about its 1 TB of storage available to Office 365 for Education customers. And there was a lot of discussion as to whether the company will need to follow Google’s lead.

• Kaltura announced its new Video Creativity Suite. The new suite includes tools for capturing, creating, recording, uploading, editing, annotating, segmenting and adding calls to action to videos. The suite includes Kaltura CaptureSpace, which is the company’s recently announced personal capture tool, and which allows faculty, students, and instructional designers to easily create multi-source video recordings. Kaltura claims it has designed its Video Creativity Suite with an intense focus on ease of use, accessible design, and single click capabilities. And the company indicated to us very rapid growth (nothing new there) as well as an extraordinary set of educational wins in Brazil, even as it is expanding into Asia/Pac.

• Dell announced a series of customer wins and, in a private briefing, showed me a Dell Venue 8 7000 Series tablet — world’s thinnest — that will blow the minds of some future education (and corporate) users. The company also continues to brag about its success in education, where its ability to provide high-level device support to its customers becomes a strategic advantage when it comes to providing other network and infrastructure services. We’ve said it before, but Apple’s ownership of the classroom is not absolute.

• HARMAN’s AMX introduced the AMX Enzo screen mirroring of mobile device content, new AMX Massio ControlPads, and new enhancements to the AMX Rapid Project Maker (RPM) Cloud-Based Configuration Resource. The addition of screen mirroring to the Enzo Platform directly benefits university lecturers already using Enzo collaboration capabilities by providing a way to display their mobile device content onto the larger screen of a large classroom or lecture hall. (Available to students as well.) Enzo screen mirroring is immediately available for tablets, smartphones and laptops (Windows/Mac OS X). AMX’s Massio ControlPads helps meld the installation flexibility and affordability of wall / lectern mount keypads with Googleholics Getting a Dose of Classroom

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the device and room control capabilities of a central controller. Massio ControlPads can be configured, right out of the box using the AMX Rapid Project Maker (RPM) cloud-based configuration tool, with no programming required. AMX also introduced its Campus Explorer Education App and a completely redesigned education website.

• In a smaller booth area than is typical for its usual presence at events, SMART Technologies showed off its SMART kapp dry erase board — and no other products — which initially raised some eyebrows. Apparently the company decided to return to Educause this year with the simple-to-use kapp board, which was announced earlier this year. The board lets you write and draw like you would a regular dry erase board. You can then connect a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device to the capture

board by scanning a Quick Response (QR) code or by tapping the Near Field Communication (NFC) tag. When you first connect your mobile device, you are directed to the Apple App Store or Google Play to download the SMART kapp app. Then you can use it to connect to the kapp board and share content. The $899 MSRP board lets you save files to Evernote, PDF,

and JPG formats, and you can email a stored image or share the screen with a local viewer for collaborating. Remote users can receive a URL that enables them to join the session. Not only was the company showing off the kapp board in its own booth, it had shared one with Google, which highlights the extent to which this pair continues to partner on technologies (witness SMART amp tied into Google Apps for Education).

What Alan thinks: Last year I wrote that Educause 2013 felt like an earthquake had occurred offshore, with the crowd knowing “something” had taken place but not yet realizing its importance. To beat that dead horse deader, the crest of the tsunami is now approaching shore. You could feel it as there appeared to be fewer Chief Academic Officer and teaching and learning pros in attendance — they already are running to high ground — and the technologists won’t be far behind.

If there is any one “theme” coming out of this year’s Educause, it’s this: storage is like water. Ahh, that works with the tsunami concept! With Google giving it away and Microsoft not far behind, it raises all sorts of issues for a) campuses that prefer to run their own premises-based tech deployments, b) schools and governments with data security issues; and c) what is going to be possible to accomplish with all that data storage? (Seriously, just as bandwidth can open up innovation, so can letting your stakeholders do work without penalizing them when storage might become an issue.) Among LMS and collaboration vendors, a tension exists: even while Blackboard confidently has moved to the cloud, others like Adobe are comfortable with their mix of premises-based, cloud-, or hybrid deployments of their technologies. Don’t expect this debate to end anytime soon, but the thought that Google and Microsoft are making storage such a “non-issue” is a very positive thought for schools (higher Ed or K-12) that want to figure out interesting new ways to leverage those assets over time. Oh, and that storage is in the ubiquitous cloud.

Among LMS and collaboration vendors, a tension exists: even while Blackboard confidently has moved to the cloud, others like Adobe are comfortable with their mix of premises-based, cloud-, or hybrid deployments of their technologies. Don’t expect this debate to end anytime soon, but the thought that Google and Microsoft are making storage such a “non-issue” is a very positive thought for schools (higher Ed or K-12) that want to figure out interesting new ways to leverage those assets over time. Oh, and that storage is in the ubiquitous cloud.

SMART kapp Board Sneaking into the Google Booth

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A few random thoughts and observations based on visits with most of the vendors listed above and a few other private briefings: educational markets and the vendors that sell into them are in flux but essentially moving up the “order of thinking” stack. Bear with me on this: In one corner the likes of Echo360 and Sonic Foundry and Kaltura are pushing on analytics, tools like polling and assessments, and user-generated content. And Blue Jeans Network and Polycom — two video conferencing incumbents — both were in full force at Educause, with the former showing off recently announced Blue Jeans Command Center — aha, analytics! (More on Blue Jeans’ accessibility announcements and this week’s AT&T partnership announcement in our next issue.) In another corner are the likes of Google and Microsoft and SMART and Adobe offering methods of, oh, leveraging analytics, and polling and assessments, and user-generated content. Sound familiar? I’ve been predicting for a while that lecture capture would collide with web conferencing. Not only has that happened, but also now web conferencing is colliding with cloud-based collaborative learning spaces. And Harman AMX and the likes of Crestron are out there still figuring out ways of getting content onto screens and devices in the classroom. (Sounds like SMART, and Google, and Microsoft getting data onto learner devices!) And the Alcatel-Lucent Enterprises and Dells and HPs and Arubas are building out Wi-Fi and wired networks and delivering their own or partnered approaches to campus infrastructure. So when Alcatel-Lucent brings Moravian College — the sixth-oldest (est. 1742) institution of higher Ed in the U.S. — as a great case study, you start to see that the buying

cycle of campus technology is such that vendors and users are really beginning to understand that the problems to be tackled start with infrastructure, but move quickly into conversations about the intersection between technology and teaching and learning. Moravian’s Scott Hughes tells me that within a year he (with Alcatel-Lucent’s help) has transformed his all-Apple campus into a wired and wireless mecca where the technologies are actually improving student recruitment. All of which is to say, there were and are a lot of different approaches to connecting campus stakeholders, and just like Clay Christensen would probably say, we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Tata Communications Global Analyst Conference 2014 ToplineBill Haskins, bhaskins@wainhouse.com and Marc Beattie, mbeattie@wainhouse.com

Tata Communications held its 5th annual global analyst conference on September 17 and 18, assembling 40 analysts at the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong. The 1 ½ day conference was led by CEO Vinod Kumar and his executive team, who provided a view into Tata Communications’ current state of business and upcoming plans. Tata Communications has grown aggressively over its 12-year history, and today carries just under 25% of the world’s internet traffic. The company boasts the largest fully-owned fiber network worldwide, connecting the top five business centers across five continents and reaching nations that account for 99% of the world’s GDP. The company continues to invest in its network, putting over a billion US dollars into its infrastructure over the last few years, and focusing on four segments: Global Enterprise, Global Carrier Services, Media & Entertainment, and NextGen. This latter is a new and unique segment targeting 25 high tech companies that includes a who’s who of leading global software and advanced communications companies. Tata Communications’ relationship to its NextGen segment is closer to that of a partnership, whereby the company seeks to enable and extend services of NextGen customers in their own lines of business.

Approximately 25% of the company’s total revenue comes from its home region of India. In the enterprise space 55% of its customers are located within India, and

Save the Date for the Next Wainhouse Research SummitMay 6-8, 2015New format. New dates. New location. New Year. Much more 1:1 analyst time. More networking. Save the date. Beginning the evening of May 6, 2015, and wrapping early afternoon May 8, 2015. Denver, Colorado, U.S.A. Brown Palace Hotel. Stay tuned for details.

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24% are located in the Americas — the second highest region by revenues.

Like many other network providers, Tata Communications’ current messaging positions itself as a non-Telco. One example is how the company has conducted a series of hackathons over the last few years, with the intent of tapping the startup community, incubating new ideas and learning from this very non-Telco group. During his state of the union opening, Vinod Kumar balanced financial updates with details on the company’s commitment to culture and employee development. The company has formalized a number of creativity programs, creating internal incubation programs (Intrepreneurship) and attending big-think communities like the Singularity University.

Big thinking aside, Tata Communications has been focused on delivering an expanded cloud service on a number of fronts. Most notably, it has invested heavily in an expanded data center footprint and will have some 50 global data centers on net in the near future. Much of the content over the course of the conference referenced back to this data center strategy.

On the UC&C front, the messaging was equally bullish. Tata Communications UC&C product line has grown at over 40% CAGR over the last 5 years, and now accounts for just under 10% of the company’s overall data revenues. The company has achieved this above-industry growth by delivering a mix of UC&C services, including global SIP trunking, contact center (which accounts for over 55% of India’s regional contact center market), and placing a large focus on expanding its trademarked jamvee hosted collaboration product line. Jamvee has grown up over the last 12 months, evolving from a video-specific hosted service model into an expanded total collaboration platform. Today, jamvee supports a range of disparate video clients, including traditional

H.323 and SIP-based room systems, WebRTC-enabled browsers, mobile endpoints, tablets, and UC clients like Cisco and Jabber. While video is still a core feature, it has expanded to include audio and web conferencing, presence, messaging, persistent content sharing, and is positioned as a federation exchange – allowing companies federated with jamvee to connect to other federated organizations without further configuration.

While other service providers are focusing on delivering hosted collaboration services direct to enterprises and/or indirect to resellers, Tata Communications is expanding its strategy towards a platform approach. This strategy includes the delivery and support of a series of APIs, allowing resellers to integrate components of the hosted platform into their existing conferencing experience, or enterprises to enable their business process. This modular platform approach is positioned as a flexible solution intended to allow third parties to purchase and leverage only the components required based on their business needs.

What Bill and Marc think: The anti-Telco messaging has become a consistent theme from every Telco we talk to — and for good reason: there is a considerable amount

of historic baggage associated with the term — slow moving, poor service, lack of user focus, etc. That said, Tata Communications is backing up its messaging with concrete actions that do appear to be very anti-Telco. We’ve been engaged directly in Tata Communications’ hackathon process, and it is apparent the company is not just tapping the startup community for product ideas — it is actively learning how to think and act like

A view of Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong, from Tata Communications’ 2014 Global Analyst Conference

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a startup. Similarly, the next-generation customers are a group that includes some of the most successful software, web, and technology-based companies in the world — you know these logos well. The Tata Communications next gen team does not follow standard Telco-oriented procedures associated with slow moving product development, laborious capital request processes, and so on. It exists in order to match the pace expected by these leading customers — sometimes delivering solutions in a tenth the time they would normally deliver based on a traditional Telco process.

On the collaboration front, the expansion from pure focus on end user and channel sales into a modular platform approach appears to be an excellent direction. Embedding UC-enablement solutions within its global network, providing APIs, and allowing for modular integration positions Tata Communications well with the partners with which it is connected. (This list includes nearly every conferencing service provider that leverages TC’s international voice services, every major Telco, and a vast number of ISPs that are delivering Internet-related services.) This strategy, combined with perhaps the largest global SIP trunking footprint, should be a recipe for success over the next five years. As with every other good idea, the litmus test for success will be a combination of volume and revenue — we’ll be watching closely. To dig deeper into Tata Communications’ strategy, we conduct a 1:1 with Peter Quinlan, VP of UCC Product Management, later this issue.

News in Brief• In mid-September, Sony briefed WR on a soon to

be released video conferencing system; the PCS-XC1. The PCS-XC1 is the newest member of the PCS product line and is expected to be available in early

November 2014 for a list price of US $3,980 (for the 720p version — 1080p support is available for an additional $1,600). The PCS-XC1 features include H.323 and SIP support; 4 Mbps total communication bit rate; 1080p 30 fps H.239 dual-stream (default of SXGA — 1080p also requires software upgrade); MPEG4 AAC 22 kHz and G.722 audio; three video images on a single display (near-end, far-end, and content); HDMI input for content; 720p record (onto USB flash drive) and streaming (multicast or unicast to 10 sites); Wi-Fi support (also requires $400 software upgrade — available in early 2015). Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the PCS-XC1 is its form factor: the entire system is contained in the base of the included Exmore 1080p 60 fps 12x optical zoom PTZ camera. WR OnDemand subscribers may review Ira and Andrew’s “take” in a new research note.

• Skype is leveraging Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, as was discussed in a blog post about some work it is doing on the audio front. The latest version of Skype provides users with higher quality audio in noisy environments. One innovation going on is that by working with Nokia Lumia phones, for example, Skype is benefitting from advanced audio processing technology provided by multiple rear- and forward-facing microphones on these devices.

• LMS / Human Capital Management / Web conferencing provider Saba has rebranded itself. No name change. Just a new corporate ID, with new logo, visual system, and messaging. Maybe even better, the company appears to be putting its SEC “challenges” behind it. And best of all, Saba announced it has achieved another strong quarter, with new cloud bookings growing 84% in the first quarter of fiscal year 2015 over the prior year period and 78% on a trailing twelve month basis over the respective prior year period.

Front and Rear Views of the Sony PCS-XC1

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1:1Peter Quinlan, Vice President UCC Product Management, Tata CommunicationsBill Haskins

We had a chance to catch up with Peter Quinlan of Tata Communications following their recent 2014 Global Analyst Conference. Based in Singapore, Peter is responsible for Tata Communications UCC Product Management, including Business Video and the company’s recently updated jamvee product line. Bill and Peter discuss key points from the conference, as well as the company’s current doings in and future plans for unified communications.

WR: Vinod Kumar dedicated much of his CEO keynote to Tata’s anti-Telco philosophy. Honestly, many of your competitors position themselves as anti-Telco. Can you

elaborate on this message, and what it means to Tata Communications?

PQ: This is foundational for Tata — driven by the fact we’re not an incumbent who can rest on our laurels. We are a challenger everywhere we go, including India! We’re not fat and happy anywhere — so we need to do things differently. We have to be smarter. We have to be better. We have to be the buddy who’s taking care of the customer’s needs. We can’t subsidize poor service on one product with good service on another.

This philosophy is also foundational in a sense that

People & Places Know someone in the industry who changed jobs? Jump into a new role yourself as vendor, end user, or channel partner? Email us at wrb@wainhouse.com to share the good news.

• Arkadin, Gregory Batchelor, EMEA Unified Communications Director

• Sonus, Michael Swade, Senior VP of Worldwide Sales & Marketing

• StarLeaf, Tom Burns, Head of Sales in North America; Charles Roberts, Business Development; Mike McCarthy, Country Manager for UK and Ireland; Jean Franćois Thau, Country Manager for France; Jonathan Tracey, Director of Service Provider Sales

• Wainhouse Research, Mark Gotta, Client Services Manager

Greg Batchelor, Arkadin

Charles Roberts, StarLeaf

Tom Burns, StarLeaf

Jean Francois Thau, StarLeaf

Mike McCarthy, StarLeaf

Jonathan Tracey, StarLeaf

Mark Gotta, Wainhouse

Research

PAGE 9Volume 15 Issue #19/ 08-October-14

Cloud video conferencing & calling

this is very much a Tata Group ethos — humility and a customer centricity, and a desire to put something back into society is very much part of our parent company’s core philosophy.

WR: For those readers who may not be familiar with Tata Communications, can you give us a brief background on your company and UC&C services?

PQ: Tata Communications was formed in the early 2000s during deregulation of the Indian telecommunications market. At the time, VSNL was the Telco supporting the entire market. When India deregulated, the Tata Group invested and took a majority stake in the international long distance group. As the dotcom bubble deflated, Tata Communications made a series of savvy investments, including Teleglobe — the world’s largest voice provider at the time — and Tyco Global Networks, a company deploying an extensive and global fiber optic cable network.

Tata Communications got into the video space in 2007, launching the first ‘Telepresence as a Service’ offer, the first B2B telepresence exchange, and the first and largest public telepresence room service. Video was a natural product segment for Tata Communications to develop — we saw aggressive growth forecasts and knew we could provide a compelling cost model based on our global network and data center assets. In our model, the more distributed the customer is, the more competitive we are — it’s a good fit for our customer base.

WR: Talk to us about the evolution from your telepresence offer into today’s jamvee UC experience.

PQ: If you follow the evolution, we started with telepresence, then moved to jamvee, which included interoperability between soft clients, standard

rooms, and telepresence rooms on a reservationless basis — our mission was to democratize video. Our jamvee UC release takes this mission one step forward, adding audio, web, and other features for a truly unified conference. So we provided the foundation all at a low price — and now we’ve added UC attributes including content sharing, instant messaging and presence, integrating rooms, mobile devices, browsers, and the most popular UC clients including Microsoft Lync and Cisco Jabber. We believe this is reflective of the way people want to join meetings. As your provider, I shouldn’t tell you how to join your meeting — you just join.

WR: I understand your jamvee solution is now powered by the Acano platform. We see Acano popping up more frequently in a number of service provider clouds — we interviewed another Acano service provider just a month ago — how do you differentiate from these other offers?

PQ: Acano’s a great platform, and we’ve worked very closely with them to create a best-in-class UC experience. But make no mistake — this is very much a Tata service. We’ve taken attributes of our telepresence service, leveraging our cloud-based switching fabric, to create a truly global, seamlessly interconnected solution — a global, cloud-based bridge. Our approach provides capacity benefits, disaster recovery benefits, and specific regional benefits.

We’re also working with other providers to wholesale this service and extend it into their regional networks. Bottom line, Acano is the best enterprise bridge technology, and we have the best network service — combining network, data center, managed services, and delivering a secure and stable UC experience.

WR: At the global analyst summit, Anthony Bartolo noted your aspiration to be the platform of platforms

If you follow the evolution, we started with telepresence, then moved to jamvee, which included interoperability between soft clients, standard rooms, and telepresence rooms on a reservationless basis – our mission was to democratize video. Our jamvee UC release takes this mission one step forward, adding audio, web, and other features for a truly unified conference.

PAGE 10Volume 15 Issue #19/ 08-October-14

— extending your solution into other provider clouds sounds like it hits on this strategy. Can you give us more detail?

PQ: Two things: first, you can view our service as a pyramid, with a foundation of fiber-optic cable infrastructure, supported by network services, connecting a global data center footprint, delivering a broad range of regional SIP trunking services, and delivering application services like jamvee at the edge. With Tata Communications, you have a service provider capable of providing a top to bottom SLA, accountable all the way down to the cable in the ground. We have the pedigree of a platform that compliments all of this, and augmented by the reach of multiple Telco relationships that we have established — extending this platform to other service providers.

Second, if you look at our jamvee application layer, we’re delivering a robust API-based wrapper. We understand that partners and enterprises will want to consume these services in many ways. Our API wrapper enables third parties to consume and adapt and build their own platforms or other services. Moving forward, we’ll be extending APIs for SIP trunking, international toll-free services (ITFS) and location and monitoring services (LMS) — enabling a wide variety of customer and partner services.

WR: Lots of providers talk a big game on APIs — do you have solutions actually in the works?

PQ: Absolutely. We’re working with a large global bank to video-enable their contact center application. We have partners who we work with around the APIs, and Tata has put a lot of work into the service layer. But still, the bank itself has resources developing on their contact center and CRM applications. So they have skin in this game — their developers are doing the actual development.

WR: As you find yourself in this new, hosted UC&C enablement space, are you feeling pressure to deliver hosted UC applications as well?

PQ: Yes. Ultimately, we’ll host the major platforms. You’ll see us enter the hosted Lync space. We’re simply getting pulled this direction. We are enabling these platforms with SIP trunking and with jamvee, and we’re often asked “can’t you just host Lync for us as well”? You’ll see us hosting Cisco HCS — this is in progress now. Overall, we’re focusing on applications that are in line with our current direction, those we’re supporting today. It’s a way to give the customer a complete solution — and we’re looking at the applications that fit very nicely with the solutions that are core for us.

New Studies from Wainhouse ResearchFor information on WR studies and subscriptions, visit www.wainhouse.com or contact sales@wainhouse.com

4Visual Collaboration and Audio Visual

Microsoft Lync in the Conference RoomMany Product Options Abound

2014 Video Conferencing Channel Partner Survey Report #1 Offerings and Customer Attitudes

4Streaming & Webcasting

First Take: VBrick Serves Up “Cloud-Native” Streaming PlatformRev” release marks important step in vendor revamp

PGi Acquires TalkPointMajor Collaboration Player Makes Big Streaming Push

4Personal & Web-Based Conferencing

21 Web Conferencing “Influencers and Contenders”Brief profiles that reveal how the underlings compete against the “Big Six” - and each other

The Web Conferencing Industry: Market Implosion or Explosion? WR UC&C Summit 2014 Presentation (video)

PAGE 11Volume 15 Issue #19/ 08-October-14

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Want MoreConferencing &Collaboration?

4Unified Communications

2014 Worldwide UCaaS Market Forecast Market Sizing and 5-Year Forecast of the Worldwide UCaaS Service Market

Microsoft vs. Cisco Unified CommunicationsAn objective overview of each vendor’s approach to UC (Presentation Deck)

4Distance Education & e-Learning

Adobe in Education and TrainingCompany Profile Examining Adobe Web Conferencing, e-Learning, Marketing, and Other Offerings

SMART amp: First TakeDescription and analysis of SMART Technologies’ most recent cloud-based teaching and learning platform.

4Audio Conferencing

Conferencing Service Provider Statistics (SpotCheck) – Q2 2014 This study details the calendar Q2 2014 trends of the worldwide collaboration service provider (CSP) market. Data is provided for audio and web conferencing services.

BT MeetMe with Dolby Voice WR’s Hands-On Testing and Opinions on BT’s New Audio Conferencing Service

PAGE 12Volume 15 Issue #19/ 08-October-14