SHIVASANKAR: It’s a continuous process for us to enhance the methods to reach out to customers. We have been enhancing our go-to-market initiatives through our channel partners. We are making ourselves more visible and available through large SIs and experienced VC players. We have also signed up with big players like Siemens and Wipro to cater to the video requirements of our customers. In the coming quarter, we would enhance our efforts to increase our reach in the market and tie up with the right partners.

SHIVASANKAR: Since it’s not a very huge market, we are not looking at engaging with too many partners. We are looking for partners who understand high definition video conferencing and who are interested in this technology. Video conferencing is no more a luxury and is becoming pervasive. We have seen that a lot of networking and IT VARs are now interested in selling VC solutions to their partners. However, we are open to working with all kinds of partners, provided they do not consider this as one more add-on to their line of products. We emphasize on this because such partners would not have any commitment towards revenue and business. Though we currently have five key partners, there a lot of other partners with whom we work on a project and opportunity basis.

SHIVASANKAR: In the VC space, you can’t afford to not have government as one of your customers because they are one of the largest buyers. The reason for government to buy VC is same as that of the enterprise- the need to communicate better, easy access to customers and to reduce the complexities of long distance travel. We are involving ourselves in various opportunities in the government sector. But since dealings with the government would not promise overnight returns, we are also preparing ourselves to go through the process of acquiring customers. We started our initiatives in the government space about 2-3 months ago and are currently working closely with customers to come up with the right products.

SHIVASANKAR: We always had a very good spread in almost all the verticals and among SMBs and enterprises. While enterprises are at the stage of improving the standards of their VC solutions, SMBs are adopting it in a very large number. The VC market in India is growing at about 23 percent and that’s reasonably healthy. The latest trend is the shift from standard definition to high definition. In the last fiscal, more than 30 percent of VC sales were in the high definition space which is very encouraging for LifeSize as we focus only on HD products. We expect that by end of this year, at least 50 percent of the industry would move towards HD. Having said that, we still see a need to increase the level of awareness about the benefits of HD among customers and make it more available so that it becomes a natural choice for them. In the days to come, our focus would be to consistently bring new technologies and products that are more affordable. Very soon, high definition video conferencing solutions would be sold through a distribution model like any other hardware product.