Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Chris Lauwers, CTO of Avistar

In today’s global marketplace, efficient video conferencing is a must. Since 1984, Avistar has been offering such services to its clients in the education, health care, finance, manufacturing, entertainment and media industries. Over the years, the company has made video conferencing faster, smoother and more affordable for its growing global clientele. Says Avistar on its website, “We believe our software-only approach is advantageous for both end user populations and our OEMs and resellers. For everyone, it means quick deployment, lower cost, and right-sized buying.”

Sramana Mitra: Hi Chris. Let’s set the context with some information about Avistar and some of your background information so the audience knows where all this perspective is coming from.

Chris Lauwers: Sure. Let me start with my own background first. I’m the CTO of Avistar. I’ve been working in the collaboration space for the last 20 years or so. I did PFC research at Stanford in an area that now would be called Web conferencing. We built one of the first Web conferencing systems. I’ve built, on top of that, for the last 20 years or so, adding voice and video capabilities to that infrastructure. For the last 20 years or so, we’ve been adding voice and video conferencing to the desktop, through personal devices primarily geared towards the enterprise space. That’s what we’ve been doing in the context of Avistar. Avistar’s focus has been on collaboration, especially around the video medium and targeted at large enterprises where video collaboration is now used to help organizations globalize their operations, to help them create virtual teams, to help them with their outsourcing capabilities and generally to be able to increase the response times to changing events in the marketplace.

Avistar historically, at least initially, was focused on building complete solutions for enterprise customers. But as the market has matured, we have narrowed our focus on what we do best, which is managing high quality video at scale. That has caused us to change our business model a little bit. So, for the last two or three years, our focus has been, in addition to selling directly to end customers, our focus has been expanding to also include an OEM channel where we now sell technology components to large OEM vendors who then take our technology, bundle it with their products and sell our joint solutions through their channels. That’s where a lot of our go-to-market focus is today. That’s also what our product development is focused on today.

SM: Great. And how big is Avistar as a company?

CL: We’re actually a public company. We had the good fortune of being one of the very last companies to go public in 2000. So, all the information is public. We have, if you include our software development teams in the Ukraine, we have about 81 people, and revenue this year will be a little short of $9 million.

SM: All right. This is great because one of the big topics in cloud computing that is of huge interest to me and the audience is collaboration, especially rich media collaboration. The fact that you’ve been in this industry for the last 20 years would give us a great set of topics to cover today.

CL: Actually, I have a perspective on that. I believe that collaboration and cloud computing very much serve as the same value proposition. If you think about what one of the benefits of cloud computing is, it’s to deliver a lot of the IT infrastructure in the cloud to really de-couple that infrastructure from the specific locations where your end users are. That allows your end users to access their infrastructures, their data, their computing resources independently from where they are. And it allows them to be productive independently of where they are.

Now, collaboration very much has that same objective. With collaboration technology, we take the face-to-face contact and we put that on the network so that even people who are not physically in the same location can communicate, can collaborate and have the same experience as [they would] if they were in the same location at the same time. So, the result is that we allow people to be productive and communicate productively independently from where they are. In order to deliver on that sort of virtual organization or flexible organization where anybody can be productive at all times, you need both of them to work together, and you need both of them at the same time. So, they’re very synergistic value propositions in our opinion.

This segment is a part in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing