When I had Peter Csathy from Sightspeed on Squawkbox last week I asked him about small business uses for his services. Sly fellow that he is, he essentially said "Stay tuned". Yesterday Sightspeed and VTel announced a partnership targeted at small and medium business. Under the terms of their deal:
- “SightSpeed Business”, their SMB focused offering, will be installed on the VTEL conference room systems. What that means is that VTEL systems will be able to interoperate with all SightSpeed client endpoints (including all consumer endpoints). Now small businesses can have the benefits of video conferencing with remote workers, without having to install a conferencing system in every site.
- In addition, VTEL will introduce and market SightSpeed Business into its reseller channel — a significant broadening of the Sightspeed distribution channel.
This is an interesting and logical counterpoint to a lot of the video activity we've seen coming from Sightspeed's chief competition in the desktop video space — Skype. By partnering with an established standards based player in this way, Sightspeed is creating new value and a new price point for professional multi-point video conferencing, and they're taking advantage of established standards in a way that Skype may find more difficult to emulate.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
