Video conferencing is notoriously frustrating, largely stemming from unnecessary complexity. Entrenched providers typically push customers to buy, deploy, and maintain huge fleets of video cameras and speakerphones. They attempt to smooth over incompatibilities with more software, downloads, extensions, and plugins to cover up the underlying technological entanglements -- only adding to the complexity. And that’s just the complexity of the user experience. It gets worse when you attempt to budget for video conferencing.
So there you are with your CIO and CFO, trying to justify a huge capital expenditure for video conferencing hardware, along with ongoing maintenance costs and per-minute fees, which are all completely unknown. For example, your hardware breaks but you don’t know when or how much it’s going to cost to fix. More calls happen at the end of a tight quarter, when a new project kicks off, or when a customer has a critical issue -- all causing the per-minute fees to skyrocket. Financially, the cost of video conferencing isn’t just high, it’s unpredictable.
It’s time for a different approach, and other industries are way ahead. Your mobile phone has had unlimited service plans for years -- you just pay a set monthly fee. The transportation sector is getting even more creative with pricing, where players like Zipcar and Volvo’s Care program offer transportation as a service. Add in on-demand services like Lyft and owning a car feels antiquated.
The same goes for conferencing. Organizations -- especially IT and Finance -- want to pay to enable video collaboration in this meeting room or that board room. It’s shortsighted to buy hardware that will be outdated in a few years. It’s expensive to waste IT’s time to maintain that hardware. It’s expensive to pay for user licenses and more per-minute and per-participant fees for every meeting. The whole package seems not only unreasonable, but unreasonably complex.
Per-room pricing that includes the hardware, software, and user licenses bundled together is what financial buyers want. It eliminates up-front capital expenditures, removes the expense of support and maintenance, and does away with the variability of per-minute pricing as well as named user licenses.
But predictability is the real game-changer. Per-room pricing gives you exact predictability of your budget. For example, for every meeting room, you pay $199 per month, every month, regardless of the number of meetings or participants. You don’t pay a penny up front to buy hardware or named user licenses. Extrapolate that to 10 rooms and you’re still paying $199 per month per room, even if someone spills coffee into the speakerphone or dropkicks the video camera. The hardware is replaced because you’re paying for the service of video collaboration, not for the hardware or the software or the user licenses or the minutes.
At Highfive, we always strive to keep it simple, from setup and use to pricing. We’ve eliminated named user licenses and reimagined a per-room pricing model that just makes sense. We’re making video collaboration insanely simple so all your employees can use video conferencing without your IT and finance teams worrying about managing named user licenses.
Learn how Highfive can reimagine your meeting rooms and video conferencing pricing. Visit
Highfive.com.
