Organisations are being discouraged from rolling out video conferencing to many meeting rooms by the costs of annual room licencing from the likes of Zoom.
In an exclusive interview with UC Today, Michael Helmbrecht, chief operating officer of Lifesize, said that Zoom Rooms’ annual room licensing and interop costs, which he called the “Zoom tax”, were having a significant impact on budgets and the number of meeting rooms that can be fully outfitted for video.
“It just doesn’t make economic sense for those enterprises that need to communicate and collaborate more effectively, not just within their own teams but with their external partners,” he said.
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Michael Helmbrecht[/caption]
He commented on the costs of fitting out meeting rooms as his company launches its Lifesize Dash meeting room kit software solution. It has also released an updated tablet-based Lifesize Room Controller application for Dash and expanded Dash compatibility with PC-based meeting room kit solutions. This enables customers to repurpose existing hardware investments and migrate to Lifesize without incurring additional costs, according to the company.
He said that the Dash room kit software solution can be implemented by customers – even on an experimental basis – at no cost and without hidden interoperability fees.
Each free Dash license enables organisations to register one meeting room to the Lifesize cloud service, supporting scheduled or instantaneous group video calls with up to 25 participants. Organisations can implement Lifesize Dash on Chromebox or Windows PC-based meeting room kit devices with support for Mac room kits coming in 2020.
