/dqc/media/agency_attachments/3bO5lX4bneNNijz3HbB7.jpg)
Follow UsDo you think India is a good market for high-definition (HD)
videoconferencing products?
Everyone knows that videoconferencing is important, but it calls for
investing a lot of money. Most videoconferencing vendors believed that the
slowdown will mean that corporates will cut down on their executives' travel for
business. But businessmen and professionals are still travelling, though the
frequency has come down. Videoconferencing should not be marketed as something
that would replace travel. Instead, vendors should emphasize on increased
productivity and faster decision making that is derived from videoconferencing
between employees of a company in different geographies.
Is high price the biggest stumbling block for HD videoconferencing?
Most of our competitions' products lack quality. We don't want to compromise
on quality to offer cheaper options to customers. We want to bring in price
economy with good quality output. Currently, we have products which cost $5,000
for customers who do not opt for the $10,000 product.
What are some of the evident trends in this business space?
We expect to get a lot of competition from standard definition
videoconferencing vendors and expect them to move towards HD. This is why there
is an immediate need to create more awareness about HD technology in video
communication amongst the channel and end-customers. We also see a lot of
business impetus coming from government and corporate verticals-especially in
the financial space-and expect them to push videoconferencing deeper into their
own organizations and make it accessible to a larger workforce than the current
set of users.
/dqc/media/post_attachments/95f01dab9f2466c057be10de43444b10d227881efeb714930cf0a40be1adc751.jpg)
| Evangelizing HD videoconferencing is a passion for Krishnamurthi Shivashankar. He is keen on emphasizing the importance of its deployment, which eradicates the need for executives to travel for business meetings, thereby maximizing their productivity. What is ironical however, is the amount of travelling he himself has to undertake to drive home this point to his clients |
Does that mean you are not focusing on SMB?
On the contrary, SMB customers make up for almost 50 percent of our clients.
But they are also the most difficult customers to deal with as they are very
price sensitive. So explaining to them why they need to pay a 15 percent premium
in order to get HD videoconferencing is not easy, when they can opt for standard
definition options, which are cheaper. But the truth is that, standard
definition video takes twice the broadband bandwidth than our products. So the
customer ends up saving on the capital expense, but pays higher operating
expense.
How do channel partners communicate your business plans to their
customers?
We engage with four distributors in the country-Actis Technologies, Enkay
TechnoÂlogies, Intellicon and PLUS Business Machines who we call our tier-1
distributors. They have around 15 more partners in the level below them. We were
slow on partner recruitment because video is a very technical product and most
IT partners were not equipped to sell it. Now that we have over 1,400
installations all over the country, especially in smaller cities, they will be
more comfortable doing business with us.
Vinita Bhatia
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in