Jill Price
Anna Gilligan:So what kinds of savings do your clients see from using video conferencing and tele-presence?
Jill Price:So the traditional one is travel. It’s the easiest to quantify, if you will. So I’ll give you a real world example. Law firm. Rather than send all their executives out and partners for a partner meeting, they conducted a two-day event via video. Granted, the video was expensive, bringing all of those locations together. I think it cost them roughly $30,000.00. They would site that that one event saved them $3.5 million.
Anna Gilligan:Wow.
Jill Price:We can then look to another organization actually that has cited saving $1 million per quarter on travel alone. But when you look on the return of investment, I also like to bring in the human factor. We are expecting more from our employees. They’re away from their families. I have two kids. Did I really need to be there in person or can I conduct this management meeting via video? By the way, Providea gets more out of me, because I’m not on an airplane, and then finally, return on investment for bringing your product to market faster. It’s not as easy and as tangible to quantify but there are retail consumers out there that would tell you that they brought their product to market faster by video. Customers have had to outsource to China or to India. They have their help desks there. They’re manufacturing oversees. How can they get their product to market faster than their competition?
Our customers have really interesting feedback in that how many times have you been working with someone and you’ve never seen them? You’ve never met them in person, of course you’ve met them on the phone, but here you are, now on video. Oh my gosh, we just had one yesterday with one of our customers. We had been working with them for eight years and one of our engineers have never met them. So they saw them on video for the first time in eight years and it just opened a whole new relationship.
Anna Gilligan:So how can video conferencing help companies with innovation and communication? I guess communication’s kind of obvious, but how does it inspire the innovation?
Jill Price:A big industry is technology. Ha ha. Technology using technology. But again, unfortunately the engineers are across the globe. Maybe they’re in China developing some game and we can’t fly back and forth all of the time, but we have the engineers and the specialists here in Los Angeles, a specialist in New York, and a specialist in China. How can we bring them together? Well, we do that via video and it’s not just the face to face, the talking heads that we’re so familiar with. It’s connecting your PC, connecting you data, doing really live – “Okay, not that’s in the wrong spot” – maybe it’s as old fashion as a document camera, an overhead camera zeroing in on a chip so that the manufacturer can see what’s gone wrong. The actual engineer designee can see what’s gone wrong, so it’s kind of endless.
We’re big in the legal industry. There are many lawyers that have just one client. Why not put video on that client’s desk? They have a direct connection. They can get their lawyer at any time. Talking about the legal industry a little bit deeper, what about the training that they have to do? There’s continuing legal education that firms have to think about. How are they gonna get that to all – what if it’s a large firm? What if it’s a small firm? We don’t want to fly everybody everywhere so the fact that they’re able to get that training faster, as an example, the fact that they’re able to have an entertainment lawyer possibly available to them in New York when your customer’s out here in LA – that’s a competitive advantage that they offer for their clients.
Anna Gilligan:You mentioned this law firm with tremendous savings from your video conferencing. Could you give me some more success stories from your clients?
Jill Price:Absolutely. Gosh, there are success stories on travel savings and ROI’s. I haven’t even touched on the savings of lives. I know that sounds very critical but there is a very real video deployment going on today – it’s been around for quite a while – for first responders. What if we could, via video, identify problems faster? What if we could get in and see fires as they’re happening and where they’re going? Literally, helicopters in the sky, streaming down via video to see where they fire is going, how we can best deploy people. So it’s that serious, it’s that critical of a tool. That’s the stuff that gives me chills and gets me emotional about it, because we could talk all day long about we’re allowing executives to not fly, right, but when there’s a human factor on – that’s a big success story that we’ve had here in California. Other success stories include customers stating that through video conferencing they have been able to hire a better workforce, because by utilizing public rooms, they’ve been able to get employees. Rather than flying them in, they’ve been able to interview them via video, expanding their ability to hire better.
Anna Gilligan:Now, I know that you have clients in a range of industries. So how tailored are your solutions to their needs? How much do you customize?
Jill Price:Thank you for asking that. We actually pride ourselves on our ability to customize our solutions. It’s one thing to have the correct end point for your customer. It’s another thing to combine it with the right services. Maybe they have their own help desk and they don’t need our help desk. Maybe they need us to enhance that. So one of the things that differentiates Providea is that we have such a video centric focus but we also can customize solutions based around video communications for our clients.
Anna Gilligan:What do you see as being the future of teleprescence? And how do you stay ahead of the pack?
Jill Price:The obvious is the collaboration that’s going on right now. Whether it’s web conferencing, audio conferencing, video conferencing – how do we bring it all together. So one of the things I really appreciate about one of our leading manufacturers – Polycom. They’re a very open network. They want to be open and bring everybody together and not worry about what you have. You, as an end user, shouldn’t worry that you’re on this platform vs. this platform, how you’re gonna bring it together. But again, since you’re asking me, I will say one of the biggest trends that I’m seeing is – I referred to it earlier – mobility. It’s one thing to have video in this beautiful conference room today; it’s another thing to have it on my desktop. It’s another thing to have it on my Mac at home, and now we’re talking about tablets and I’m and iPhone user so I’m gonna say iPhone has the camera there. What does that mean? How do we make that seamless to the end user? You shouldn’t have to worry about that. The CIO worries about it. How’s he gonna bring everybody together? That’s the future.
Anna Gilligan:So you mentioned Polycom. Can you tell me a bit about your partnership with them and how it enables you to deliver the best technology to your clients?
Jill Price:Polycom was actually instrumental in the founding of Providea. So we’ve grown with them. Whether it’s just been a set top product – which was their flagship model – to everything that they’ve developed and delver today. Everything from desktop all the way to immerse a tele-prescense to the room we’re in now. Their products have enabled us to provide customize solutions – kinda back to what we were saying earlier about being able to tailor services. Well, how about tailoring products? We’ve had customers come to us and say, “We want immersive tele-presence, HD as good as it gets, for 40 people in a single room”. Uh-huh. It’s doable. Polycom offers that today. We want to be able to have several bridges, if you will, that are going to bring hundreds and hundreds of people together via video. We don’t want to tax just this bridge, we need to tax three and four of them. Well, Polycom enables that through a product that they have today with DMA. So their solutions have really enabled us as a service provider to offer better services to our customers, but their end points and solutions that they offer have enabled us to provide the best strategy for customers and what they’re trying to accomplish.
Anna Gilligan:Now you mentioned this law firm with tremendous savings from your video conferencing. Could you give me some more success stories from your clients?
Jill Price:Absolutely. Gosh, there are success stories on travel savings and ROI’s. I haven’t even touched on the savings of lives. I know that sounds very critical but there is a very real video deployment going on today – it’s been around for quite a while – for first responders. What if we could, via video, identify problems faster? What if we could get in and see fires as they’re happening and where they’re going? Literally, helicopters in the sky, streaming down via video to see where they fire is going, how we can best deploy people. So it’s that serious, it’s that critical of a tool. That’s the stuff that gives me chills and gets me emotional about it, because we could talk all day long about we’re allowing executives to not fly, right, but when there’s a human factor on – that’s a big success story that we’ve had here in California. Other success stories include customers stating that through video conferencing they have been able to hire a better workforce, because by utilizing public rooms, they’ve been able to get employees. Rather than flying them in, they’ve been able to interview them via video, expanding their ability to hire better.
Anna Gilligan:So tell me more about your professional services part of the business.
Jill Price:Great story of a customer. We asked them, “So who’s gonna manage your deployment for you?” And he pointed to an empty chair and said, “What if we could fill that chair?” and our professional services was founded right on that sentence in 2002. So the next thing you know, we are their management. They outsource everything to us, whether we have somebody on site for their AV rooms, launching the calls for them, or whether we are managing everything remotely from their endpoints to the latest software to the phone books, the address books. We have some customers that choose to own all of the equipment and have us manage it for them remotely. We have customers that want us to own everything. They’ll own the endpoints and they want us to be their staff, their eyes, their ears, their network. Video has gotten so sophisticated in such a day to day mainstream type for the fortune 500s if you will, we’ve got to find a way to get it down into the day to day small business aspect and the easier it is to do, the easier it is and we’ll all be using it. Polycom most recently has announced they’re open collaboration network. They’re thinking the same way we are. We don’t care what network you’re on. Doesn’t matter if you’re on Orange, if you’re on AT&T, if you’re Verizon, if you’re one of 500 different networks. No two networks is alike. We don’t care. We want to find a way to bring you together.
Anna Gilligan:Now tell me how your partnership with Polycom has led you to have this best in breed tele-presence solution?
Jill Price:They actually have the beautiful OTX that we’re sitting in now for three people. They have the RPX that goes all the way up to 40 people. They then have the middle solution, which is built in plasmas, LCDs, plasmas, the cart mobile – you can roll it around from conference room to conference room. Very simplistic. Then going down to desktop, they’ve really been innovative this past year. Their partnerships that they’ve announce with Microsoft, whether it be with Avia, Brokane and Juniper, the partnerships are endless making it easier on me. So no longer do I have to go in and my first question is, “So, what do you use for email? What’s your phones? What’s your PBX strategy?” Polycom makes it simple to not have to forklift everything that customers have already invested in. They have solutions that allow us to come in and tailor just the end point. So you’re Microsoft shop? Great. This codex would work best. So you’re an Avia shop? Great. Let’s incorporate what you’ve already done.