Lifesize Debuts Rooms-as-a-Service for Video Conferencing

Lifesize, a global provider of video collaboration and meeting productivity solutions, has rolled out a new Rooms-as-a-Service offering.

The offering allows customers to purchase Lifesize’s video meeting room devices, video conferencing service and support with predictable pricing and lower upfront costs, according to the company. It is available immediately to customers in the United States and Europe with more expansive international availability planned for 2020.

Lifesize’s Tim Maloney

Tim Maloney, Lifesize’s senior vice president of worldwide channels, tells Channel Partners that organizations have historically taken an incremental approach to video collaboration investments due to upfront cost.

“With Lifesize Rooms-as-a-Service, our partners can now help those customers more easily plan, budget for and scale their video technology improvements to meeting spaces and experiences,” he said. “Through this new offering, partners can get customers started with and standardized on Lifesize’s industry-leading, all-in-one meeting room solutions via a simple subscription model, with meeting room hardware, cloud service, maintenance and support provided for a predictable, fixed price.”

With the new offering, Lifesize is removing any perceived risk of “solution lock-in” associated with capital investments that might cause a customer to hold back from implementing video in their meeting rooms, Maloney said.

“Additionally, organizations looking to scale video collaboration across many meeting rooms are often deterred by Zoom Rooms’ steep interoperability costs on top of annual licensing – together making up the ‘Zoom tax’,” he said. “These added interoperability fees limit the number of meeting rooms that can be effectively outfitted for video collaboration. Therefore, from an economic standpoint, Lifesize Rooms-as-a-Service (including our free Lifesize Dash solution), which all have interoperability baked in, will provide customers the ability to communicate with internal and external parties while maintaining manageable budgets..”

Rooms-as-a-Service is something Lifesize’s partners have been asking for, and it can be particularly effective in industries where IT might have shied away from video conferencing due to traditionally high upfront investments and lock-in, such as education, manufacturing or government, Maloney said.

“Partners are absolutely critical to our business strategy, as 96% of our global revenue flows through the channel,” he said. “Our old channel program reflected the on-prem model, and a core group of exceptional partners has stayed with us on the journey to revitalization. We now have about 5,000 partners within our refreshed global program built around SaaS principles, cloud-based communication solutions and all-encompassing support, with the fastest-growing segment of that program being agency partners.”

“The most successful modern enterprises embrace video collaboration as a primary method of communication across the business,” said Michael Helmbrecht, Lifesize’s COO. “With Lifesize Rooms-as-a-Service, we’re responding to customers’ desire to accelerate video initiatives by making it significantly easier to predict and scale costs as they improve meeting spaces and experiences with video collaboration technology.”