Near Telepresence at a Fraction of the Cost
There seems to be no doubt if your company has corporate jets you can afford and will likely embrace a telepresence system from a company like Cisco or Polycom and spend up to $300k per unit to do so. But for those companies who might think twice about spending the equivalent of the average US house on their videoconferencing solution, there are choices.
One such choice comes from a company called Lifesize who has been making lots of noise in the HD videoconferencing market. Lifesize sits in the market at the midrange, providing excellent video quality at a fraction of the cost of the big boys. The goal of the company is to be the price/performance leader and I can vouch for the quality of their technology as I had a chance to see it for myself. At one megabit per second the quality was impressive and at 512kbps the quality did degrade with some pixilation but it was still acceptable.
Many have made the point that $300k is a major investment for telepresence and perhaps this is why the entry level cost of $8k for the Lifesize solution seems absolutely cheap. If you want a MCU which allows three others to join in the call, the price jumps 50% to a still relatively palatable $12k. In addition, the Lifesize system interoperates with solutions from other vendors.
So if your company has a corporate jet and you are still reading this article you may be snickering at how the common enterprise can’t pony up millions for their videoconferencing solution. For those of you who have limited budgets and are looking for great quality videoconferencing without breaking the financial or bandwidth bank, you should look seriously at Lifesize.
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Hey Rich,
My name is Al Sacco and I'm a writer with CIO.com. I recently reviewed the LifeSize Room HD videoconference system, which retails for $11,999. I thought you and your readers might be interested in the article. Here's a link:
http://www.cio.com/article/124000