IPeak: On The Forefront Of The Video Revolution

Company:

Headquarters: Ottawa, Ontario

Technology Sector: Networking

Key Product: IPQ

Year Founded: 2004

Number of Channel Partners: Established base in Europe, beginning recruitment in North America

Ideal Channel Partner: Managed services provider

Why You Should Care: The explosion of opportunities for videoconferencing goes hand in hand with a need for premium video delivered on optimized WANs. IPeak Networks wants to fill in the gaps -- in packet loss and in video-over-IP challenges in general -- where it says other vendors fall short.

The Lowdown: IPeak Networks was founded in 2004 but didn't launch its suite of IPQ (Internet Performance & Quality) services for nearly five years, following a half-decade of intensive R&D and funding efforts. It's charging headlong into the video space, however, at exactly the right time. Video services, from basic videoconferencing to high-end telepresence, have finally hit the mainstream in enterprises, and bandwidth is cheaper and more available than ever. Quality, however, is not.

"It's a relatively small price point per endpoint. We see it as our solution doesn't cost a lot of money but adds a ton of value," said Brett McAteer, vice president of marketing and channel development. "We operate at a low level in the IP stack, take care of packet loss on the WAN and therefore add the levels of performance and quality needed to make all these video investments strong."

It is in video-over-IP, McAteer argues, where the effects of packet loss are often most apparent. IPeak's various IPQ lines include IPQ for Videoconferencing, including IPQ Lite, IPQ Business and IPQ VCPro Series Concentrators; IPQ for Telepresence, focusing on bandwidth-intensive telepresence deployments; and IPQ for VDI, focusing on virtualized desktop infrastructure environments.

All represent a golden opportunity for the channel, McAteer said, especially the long-established video channel that now sees bandwidth as a commodity and knows it's the quality of service on the network that's starting to matter more as a value-add.

IPeak is marketing its services to both traditional videoconferencing hardware and software resellers and also managed services providers with a focus on the video and broader IP space. The Venn diagram that connects those two types of solution providers, McAteer said, is expanding, with greater overlap as both types try to make sense of the growing opportunities in video.

"The tendency is to be oriented toward selling the gear, and the network issues are someone else's to deal with," McAteer said. "But that's changing, and the MSP itself is changing. The definition of MSP has changed considerably in the last five years, and it's no longer just someone saying, 'I sell a bridging service.' "

IPeak has several distributor and reseller partnerships in Europe and Asia but has just begun to build its channel in North America, where it relies primarily on agents. According to McAteer, IPeak's goal is to be able to shift the emphasis on sales to resellers in North America but, for the moment, it's important not to just open the floodgates and hope it all works out.

"Something we've learned is that when you just hand it all off, that hardly ever works," he said. "Channels is a mature market distribution scenario, and as much as videoconferencing is somewhat mature, it's in a breakout situation right now. I'm letting a lot of [VARs] find me. The people who find me -- who have the energy to dial my number -- means they've connected to what we have on some visceral level.

"I'd love to be in all the major metros in North America, but I'm not fussy about how that happens," added McAteer, describing IPeak goals for 2010. "We're going to work through it one market at a time. If a distributor has 50 resellers in this space, I can probably get five or six of those guys excited enough to do this."