The video marketplace is undergoing significant transition, mostly in the direction of software and less-expensive solutions. Zeus recently recapped Polycom's repositioning, which aims to present that company as primarily a software player, while Melanie summarized Frost & Sullivan research that suggested, as she put it, that "The videoconferencing market is fast approaching an inflection point driven by high-quality and low-cost solutions combined with an escalating need for rich collaboration. While adoption in the past has largely taken place as a high-end enterprise application, the benefits of videoconferencing are now extending to mainstream users."
Several newcomers have tried to capitalize on video trends around software, desktop improvements, and the generally increasing popularity of video. Vidyo drove the acceptance of Scalable Video Coding (SVC) for more cost-effective bandwidth usage, and other companies are thinking outside the box as well.
One such company is Starleaf, a Sunnyvale-based startup that came out of the gate with an offering that was defiantly retro in its naming: the Telepresence PBX. You'll still find that name in Starleaf's literature, but when I got my latest briefing from Mark Loney, Starleaf's CEO, his talk and his slides opted for the more generic term "infrastructure" to describe the heart of the Starleaf system. Nevertheless, Starleaf's latest offerings focus on the hot areas of video that Melanie Turek discussed in her post: Mobility and the desktop.
On mobility, StarLeaf has just announced Breeze, a software client that runs on either Windows or Mac PCs or on iPad. It's being offered as a $39 a month service off of StarLeaf's cloud-based videoconferencing offering (trials don't start until Q3 with GA scheduled for Q4).
One unique aspect of Breeze is that it can run on a tablet that's connected to StarLeaf's phone set for videophone calling (as in the image below). Yoking the tablet to the phone was a highlight of Cisco's failed Cius tablet, but in StarLeaf's case, the tablet isn't a proprietary enterprise device, it's a mass-market iPad that simply can take advantage of the phone-based call control that the desk set offers, by connecting to the phone via USB. Mark Loney said StarLeaf plans to implement a fixed-mobile convergence capability, so that you can unhook the tablet from the phone in the middle of a call and keep the call going uninterrupted; that feature is still in the future, however. Meanwhile, Breeze can also run standalone on a laptop for mobility without the phone.
StarLeaf's other product announcement was a little box called PT Mini (PT stands for Personal Telepresence). This is a box about the size of an old-fashioned desktop dialup modem that essentially provides the hardware necessary to turn an existing desktop into an HD video endpoint. The user plugs the PT Mini into their monitor and their StarLeaf phone to create a desktop telepresence experience that Mark Loney said will rival desktop telepresence systems that still sell for around $5K, versus the $995 that StarLeaf will charge for the PT Mini.
The idea with this product was to push desktop telepresence below the price point at which an executive is likely to need outside approval for purchase. At sub-$1K, StarLeaf is betting that executives will be able to buy the box without a lot of approvals or cost justification, leading to wider deployment of the technology.
Like the Breeze client, the PT Mini will trial in 3Q and GA in 4Q.
Having a mobile soft client like Breeze tied to a cloud offering (which Starleaf announced at Enterprise Connect earlier this spring, gets StarLeaf to the software-focused world that video seems headed for. The telephone/PBX aspect is there for those who want it, and maybe you could argue--somewhat counter-intuitively--that there's more of a business case for desktop phones if they're less about voice calling, and more about easy call-controlling for voice and video at the desktop.
The video marketplace appears poised for continued evolution, which opens up possibilities for the likes of StarLeaf and Vidyo (the latter of which recently added Juniper Networks to its roster of investors). With Avaya buying Radvision and Polycom repositioning, it looks like there'll be a lot of action to watch in video the rest of this year and into 2013.
