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LifeSize Communications
It will be LifeSize and the smaller players that benefit most from channel turmoil stemming from Cisco-Tandberg, Wainhouse's Weinstein argued.
With so many Cisco VARs out there already -- and many of the most lucrative videoconferencing deployments for both Cisco and Polycom poised to go to large VARs and integrators -- it's smaller solution providers that may be looking elsewhere as a way to separate themselves from the pack.
"If I'm a sub-$10 million video conferencing reseller, I'll have a lot of Cisco partners to compete with," Weinstein explained. "So maybe I find some success looking to Logitech-LifeSize, or to Radvision, or to places that weren't previously my primary area of interest because there's less competition for those products."
For LifeSize, however, merely attracting new VARs won't be enough.
Joe Vitalone, vice president of sales for the Americas, said that LifeSize's goal is to successfully bring HD, telepresence and video conferencing prices down far enough that Cisco and Tandberg can't effectively compete with their offerings.
"Cisco's acquisition was a major statement by Chambers, no doubt. If this were poker, he wouldn't be all in, but he is throwing in a lot of chips," Vitalone said. "But I believe that the industry is going to do better, cheaper, faster products. We're going to democratize videoconferencing for the masses. We don't think that HD should cost $200,000. We don't think HD should cost $50,000. So we like the fact that they're in the space now, validating what we do. We're in a nice position."
LifeSize, says Vitalone, offers partners 25 to 30 percent of gross margins on its video products. The goal with the lower pricing, he explained, is to field thousands of LifeSize endpoints and then let those partners design and offer services, bridges and other forms of value-add on top of them.
Logitech's acquisition of LifeSize helps that goal, Vitalone said, because of Logitech's experience with consumer and low-end video end points. Logitech, plus the introduction of Skype integration for LifeSize's own midmarket products -- an announcement expected in a few months, Vitalone said -- gives LifeSize a wide range of end point options, from consumer to enterprise.
"Our margin level is very attractive," he said. "We've seen some Tandberg partners sense what's coming. They've built their business on higher margins, right? We've added a lot of partners that are retail-oriented, and also added some major distributors that are going to bring serious bench strength."
Vitalone has a long history in the space. He helped architect channel programs at Polycom in the early 2000s as its vice president of sales and business development, when, at the time, Polycom enjoyed 75 percent market share of audio speaker phones and 56 percent market share for videoconferencing products.
Most recently, he was vice president of North America sales for ShoreTel -- a seat, he said, that gave him deeper knowledge and greater visibility into video's role in the expanding unified communications market and how VARs sell in that market.
"Ask major Fortune 1000 companies which way they think the video conferencing industry is going to go. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of them will say it's going to be commoditized," Vitalone said. "We're going to lead that effort. We're going to drive the cost out of this but not to the point where partners can't make a significant living doing it."
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