Now there's a couple of terms you pretty much never see togther: "Telepresence PBX." The legacy voice vendors, as well as any new entrants to the enterprise communications space, are running away from the "PBX" label as fast as their corporate markteing legs can carry them. But a new startup called Starleaf has embraced this apparent oxymoron to describe the new product and company they launched this week.
I had a chance to meet with two of Starleaf's leadership a couple of weeks before the company's unveiling. CEO Mark Loney and CTO Will MacDonald are both video industry veterans, having started up Codian, which made MCUs and other video products before being acquired by Tandberg in 2007. Their startup pedigrees go back as far as Madge Networks in the 1990s.
So what are these guys thinking? A telepresence PBX?
Starleaf's goal is to capture its early customers among C-level executives who want personal or room telepresence that they can control as easily as they can make a phone call today--as Will pointed out to me, "Everyone knows how to use a phone."
And indeed, as the schematic below shows, the system looks a lot like a traditional voice architecture, with a PBX at the core:
The PBX and the desk phones can operate in voice-only mode, but with the overall system costing $10,000 a seat, Starleaf isn't even thinking about pitching this as a voice-only sale with video-upsell potential. This is video from the get-go, that just happens to use an interface familiar from a century of telephone deployments.
The idea is, add high-def video and integrate legacy products via the Telepresence PBX and/or the Telepresence Border Controller, and you've got something that can use the existing dial plan along with an interface that high-value end users will instantly feel comfortable with.
The system uses a custom Starleaf video monitor that lists for $7,500; this has the camera built into the bezel and can serve as the user's desktop monitor for other devices.
The initial release of the system comes in two models: the TPBX 6010 can support up to 50 users on a two-rack-unit Telepresence PBX, while the TPBX 6110 model scales up to 1,000 users on a 6U Telepresence PBX.
Mark Loney and Will MacDonald stressed to me, and Starleaf stresses in its marketing, that this product's big sell is on ease of use, both for the end user, who can dial up a telepresence session as easily as dialing a phone; and for the network administrator, who have a single point of administration in the form of the Telepresence PBX. That's a compelling idea in a video world where call setup often requires disproportionate amount of human interaction--at least if you want to make sure that the bigwigs that are using the system get the high-quality experience they're demanding.
As for the fact that the entire rest of the world is thinking about how soon they can stop saying "PBX" and how soon they can take hard phones off of desktops--Mark and Will don't deny that they're swimming against that particular tide. But, they say, starting as they are from scratch, they don't have to catch up to Cisco or Polycom anytime soon--they just have to grab some quick wins and a relatively small piece of the market.
Taking Starleaf's debut together with this week's announcement from Vidyo of a new take on telepresence from that young company, and we're starting to see that, despite consolidation on the high end, there are still new ideas percolating at the smaller side of the vendor environment. Both of these announcements seek to solve real problems or points of discontent in real-world telepresence/video conferencing deployments: In the case of Starleaf, it's ease of use, and in the case of Vidyo, it's screen real estate for multi-point (as opposed to point-to-point) telepresence sessions.
Hopefully, these innovations from newer companies are a sign that people are engaging with video, enough to want to solve the challenges that continue to hold back wider-spread deployments. This is definitely an area worth watching.
