Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Shan Sinha, CEO of HighFive (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have video and audio web conferencing all in one platform?

Shan Sinha: That’s right. You get audio conferencing, web conferencing, and video conferencing in one place What makes us particularly unique is that we’ve consolidated each of those point solutions that I was describing into a single solution that is easy to buy, easy to deploy, easy to manage, and most importantly, easy enough for people to use.

The analogy that I would give you is, it’s a lot like what a lot of cable companies ended up doing back in the days. You used that to buy your Internet from one place, your phone service and television service from somewhere else. Then they end up consolidating all of that into a single turnkey package. The difference with HighFive is we do that in a way that customers love working with us.

Sramana Mitra: Is your videoconferencing capable of showing multiple video feeds?

Shan Sinha: It varies from platform to platform. For mobile devices, you’ll see one primary video and then you’ll see other videos swap in. On other devices, you see multiple video feeds up on your screen. What makes HighFive unique is we have built hardware that you can install in your room in a plug-and-play way that allows you to use the big TV in your room.

You have an app that you can use from you mobile devices that allows people to join in whenever they’re not in a physical room. All of it works together to deliver a great experience. It’s designed for businesses where multiple people can all get connected to each other by simply clicking a link.

Sramana Mitra: Synthesize this for me. Where is this industry going? What key trends should we be watching for?

Shan Sinha: There are a few trends worth calling out. Trend number one is something that happens to all produce categories. You have a set of tools that used to require a lot of complex equipment that were hard to configure and sometimes required old-school client-server technology.

If you think about Cisco TelePresence, it requires a whole lot of equipment and a whole lot of hard-to-configure and hard-to-use software. Then it requires a lot of equipment to make all that stuff work together. A big trend that’s happening right now is all that stuff is moving to the cloud. It’s turning into a service that you can sign up for. You can turn on and, within a couple of days, be fully up and going and deployed across your entire organization. The hardware works the same way your consumer electronics devices work.

Ours powered by really powerful cloud-based software that has the benefit of all the view capabilities that we are able to provide. This migration from old architectures to cloud-based technology is trend number one. You see that happening in every other category of tools. CRM tools have moved to the cloud. Email, messaging, and every single tool that business use these days is moving to the cloud. Conferencing is one of the latest to finally catch on to that trend.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Shan Sinha, CEO of HighFive
1 2 3 4 5