Do you think India is a good market for high-definition (HD) videoconferencing products?
Everyone knows that videoconferencing is important, but it calls for investing a lot of money. Most videoconferencing vendors believed that the slowdown will mean that corporates will cut down on their executives' travel for business. But businessmen and professionals are still travelling, though the frequency has come down. Videoconferencing should not be marketed as something that would replace travel. Instead, vendors should emphasize on increased productivity and faster decision making that is derived from videoconferencing between employees of a company in different geographies.

Is high price the biggest stumbling block for HD videoconferencing?
Most of our competitions' products lack quality. We don't want to compromise on quality to offer cheaper options to customers. We want to bring in price economy with good quality output. Currently, we have products which cost $5,000 for customers who do not opt for the $10,000 product.

What are some of the evident trends in this business space?
We expect to get a lot of competition from standard definition videoconferencing vendors and expect them to move towards HD. This is why there is an immediate need to create more awareness about HD technology in video communication amongst the channel and end-customers. We also see a lot of business impetus coming from government and corporate verticals-especially in the financial space-and expect them to push videoconferencing deeper into their own organizations and make it accessible to a larger workforce than the current set of users.

Does that mean you are not focusing on SMB?
On the contrary, SMB customers make up for almost 50 percent of our clients. But they are also the most difficult customers to deal with as they are very price sensitive. So explaining to them why they need to pay a 15 percent premium in order to get HD videoconferencing is not easy, when they can opt for standard definition options, which are cheaper. But the truth is that, standard definition video takes twice the broadband bandwidth than our products. So the customer ends up saving on the capital expense, but pays higher operating expense.

How do channel partners communicate your business plans to their customers?
We engage with four distributors in the country-Actis Technologies, Enkay Techno­logies, Intellicon and PLUS Business Machines who we call our tier-1 distributors. They have around 15 more partners in the level below them. We were slow on partner recruitment because video is a very technical product and most IT partners were not equipped to sell it. Now that we have over 1,400 installations all over the country, especially in smaller cities, they will be more comfortable doing business with us.

Vinita Bhatia
vinitavs@cybermedia.co.in

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