Business Video with Customers and Partners - Two New Year's Options

If you see video as important for successful collaboration and negotiation, you almost certainly believe it is important to have easy video connectivity with customers and with partner organizations outside your enterprise firewall. The uses are numerous, ranging from complex or intense sessions for projects or designs or negotiations to something as simple as staying in close touch on a personal basis.

There two exciting new announcements this month to make this more possible than ever. Both Lifesize and NextPlane are taking steps to make business-to-business (B2B and public sector) interactions more available, affordable and easy to use.

Lifesize Cloud

Lifesize announced the enhancement of their Lifesize Cloud to deliver browser-based video between any two or more users. Lifesize is using WebRTC for this service so that the video "plug-in" is already provided in the Chrome or Firefox browsers. Internet Explorer and Safari browsers are also supported with a quick download at the start of the session. For an initial session, a web invitation is sent to the other party; but once the other party is known to the Lifesize Cloud, you can just "call" them with one click. In a recent demo, this calling feature showed impressive convenience.

Further, by February, the Lifesize Cloud will work directly with Microsoft Lync 2013 on-premises IM/Presence servers (i.e. even if conferencing or enterprise voice are not installed) so that any Lync user can click to call anyone who is known through the Lifesize cloud. In March, Lifesize expects to also support Lync video connections for Office 365 users.

For planned meetings, rather than ad hoc calls, scheduling is easy, too, via Microsoft Outlook using Lifesize's Outlook plug-in and via Google Calendar using Lifesize's Chrome extension.

Lifesize bolstered this announcement with the introduction of small room solutions for those many huddle rooms or side tables where people are increasingly holding collaborative work sessions. The Lifesize Icon 400 brings this for Lifesize Cloud users via a direct network connection at $2,499 MSRP; the Lifesize Icon Flex brings this for users of almost every other conferencing software package (Lync, Hangouts, Jabber, Skype, GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc.) via a USB connection at $1,999 MSRP.

Nextplane Federation

NextPlane announced the January launch of their NextPlane Voice and Video Collaboration service as an enhancement of their increasingly popular NextPlane UC Exchange federation service. The NextPlane solution now has over 500,000 unique users who federate with over 800 domains and have shared 370 million IM messages to date. The NextPlane enhancement is that any user can now contact another federated user via voice or video with one click, using their existing UC client.

For example, a user on Microsoft Lync IM/Presence client could click to talk or see a user on a Cisco Jabber client and the voice or video session would proceed directly on each user's UC client. No switching of clients, no plug-ins, etc. Instead, NextPlane has used what they have learned over years of federating with a variety of clients to now enable the voice and video from and to those clients while making the necessary conversions in the NextPlane cloud. The current list of supported systems and UC clients includes Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Unify, GENBAND, BroadSoft, Mitel, OpenFire, et al.

Users can use whatever voice and video devices they have, whether built into their laptops or connected by USB (such as the Lifesize Icon Flex mentioned above or any number of other desktop or tabletop devices on the market).

Breakthrough Possibilities

The power of each of these announcements is that they are simplifying real-time communications, especially video calls, between companies and organizations. As mentioned above, there is no doubt that there are many great applications for use of video in business and public sector workflows and processes.

In the past a video session usually required an invitation to the external party to join a meeting, often requiring the installation of the specific client or plug-in for that meeting. In some cases, the external customers or partners were given "accounts" on the enterprise system, but that required careful administration, often of a separate DMZ-based system. In a few cases, the partners or customers would be using the same brand of system and could establish system-to-system federation, yet that also required specific administration attention.

In two different ways, both the Lifesize and the NextPlane solutions change all of that and open up another new vein of Unified Communications gold to be mined by organizations who want to achieve performance improvements, not just telecom cost savings. Both of these new solutions seem to me to be worth a look. My thanks to Lifesize and NextPlane for expanding the realm of possibility for optimized communications.