This week, I sat down via video conference with Daryl Hutchings, co-founder of Collaboration Squared, to talk about the company's latest announcement, Ubiety Room. You may remember Collaboration Squared from its participation in Enterprise Connect Orlando 2015's Innovation Showcase (see my earlier podcast interviews with representatives of the seven participating companies).
Daryl described Ubiety Room as a codec that enables users to turn any room into an interoperable video collaboration room when used on any standard PC, Mac, or Chromebox.
In our interview, I set out to find out how Ubiety Room achieves Collaboration Squared's promise of enabling every meeting room with video collaboration capabilities.
"The goal here is all about interoperability," Daryl said. "Interoperability with traditional video endpoints, interoperability with Lync, interoperability with browsers and the phone. Naturally when we wanted to create a room-based login, we wanted to extend this interoperability to the meeting room PC and Mac -- even a Chromebox for that matter."
Collaboration Squared found that most meeting rooms already have a PC in them that is there for purposes like document storage or image projections, Daryl said. With a computer already in place, why not take advantage of that fact with a software-only solution that can transform the functionality of existing technology?
Of course, it is fair to note that there are a lot of competitors in the room conferencing space, including big players like Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize and Avaya, as well as more disruptive companies like Vidyo. That said, I had to ask what was so special about Ubiety Room that sets it apart.
"Our goal with the Ubiety Room solution is not to replace customers' traditional video conference endpoints, but to complement them," Daryl said. "With Ubiety Room we can enable video collaboration in many more meeting rooms for very low cost using customers' existing multipurpose compute devices with USB peripherals and our software/cloud."
Take a listen to the audio for the full interview and to learn more about the Ubiety Room solution. We discuss other interesting elements including setup, how this solution factors into the BYOD trend, and traditional conferencing systems as well as applications like Skype for Business.
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