VisibilityOne provides a cloud-based videoconferencing service, designed to support multi-vendor environments, and be very simple to install and use. It is slated for general release in early summer, and will be sold through UCC-focused partners.
VisibilityOne dashboard
Los Angeles-based VisibilityOne is looking to shake up the unified communications and collaboration [UC&C] market with their new video conferencing monitoring platform which is specifically designed for multi-vendor environments, an environment they say is not well served at present.
“The market has traditionally had many players in monitoring, but it has focused on networks and servers and systems,” said Jose De La Paz, VisibilityOne’s co-founder and CEO. “In the past ten years, we have seen others jump in like Nectar and IR, as well as new solutions like Skype for Business. What has evolved, however, is a system with significant implementation concerns around videoconferencing, which involve spending hours running from conference room to conference room.”
A key problem here is the difficulty of making a system work across multiple vendor solutions and cloud services.
“There has been nothing specifically designed to address a multi-vendor environment, although that’s what most companies have when they get past a certain size,” De La Paz said. “82 per cent of companies above 250 employees have a mixed video conferencing environment. There has been nothing to tie all this together in a single view for IT to manage. So I gathered a team together, and we designed a solution to make it simple for IT teams to manage multi-vendor environments.”
De La Paz was told when they started the project that others had had the same idea before – but the task of making it work had been too difficult.
Jose De La Paz, VisibilityOne’s co-founder and CEO
“I was told that many have tried to do this, and all had failed,” he said. “It is complex. It requires not being wedded to any hardware, but it also requires having an in-depth knowledge of every solution in that ecosystem of multiple vendors. It required a lot of infrastructure and servers before the insight needed to manage the environment could be generated. The hardest thing we had to do was make it simple.”
VisibilityOne’s monitoring technology doesn’t require existing video infrastructure, and minimal UC&C knowledge is needed to integrate existing conferencing solutions, monitoring platforms, and notification services. Setup only requires downloading and installing the VisibilityOne app, which is currently supported on Microsoft Windows workstation and server operating systems. Only one download per building location is required. The app securely communicates with existing video conferencing equipment to gather and consolidate data, and delivers the data securely to VisibilityOne’s cloud service, which is immediately accessible through their cloud user dashboard.
The private beta involved eight months of testing with clients like U.S. Foods, William Lyon Homes and Washington State University. Those three reference customers are fairly diverse, and De La Paz said that accurately reflects the interest they have seen so far.
“We’ve seen response all across the board,” he said. “It isn’t limited to certain types of verticals. “The degree of complexity needed to make our solution valuable is really applicable in companies that are 250 employees or larger, and the value grows as the environments go larger, all the way to 10,000 plus.”
When VisibilityOne hits General Availability it will use a hybrid Go-to-Market model, to both acquire lighthouse customers and expand the footprint.
“Initially, we will focus on a smaller number of partners, and concentrate on helping them grow,” De La Paz said. “As we grow, we plan to expand the channel, and will focus on each region and territory. We will be looking for partners with a focus on video conferencing and UCC, who have gotten those calls from customers, and seen those challenges.”
The plan is to roll it out in the Americas first – the U.S., Canada and Mexico – and then expand to Latin America, Europe and onward from there.
“We believe we are unique in this area,” De La Paz said. “We have two patents, a third in the process of being issued, and a fourth that is patent pending. Our technology will evolve further over the next 24 months with AI features and self-healing and other areas where this particular industry has not gone yet on the roadmap.”
Polycom Group Series and Cisco SX video conferencing devices will be integrated during the public beta phase. Audio, Cloud, and Network Devices will be live in the coming months with the official launch set for early summer 2019.
