In response to your excellent blog regarding the latest Dell – LifeSize partnership, we would like to add the following comments and information to your perspective:

2. You are right, the times Have Changed in the videoconferencing industry. Because of the ongoing cost of doing business and meeting face to face, telepresence and videoconferencing have become a necessity – not a luxury. However, what is not widely known is that videoconferencing including telepresence is now affordable, with a few companies offering product rentals and managed services that fit any budget. This allows companies that don’t want to make a capital investment and/or don’t want to have IT personnel manage it, the capability to use a convenient outside resource to do it for them. Fortunately, utilizing managed services allows the company to avoid increasing their personnel and infrastructure cost at a fraction of an IT person’s annual salary.

3. LifeSize HD Products. Many of the high definition products on the market today are being compared as “equal” when that is not the case at all. Most are not “original” high definition products – instead they are standard definition products that have been upgraded utilizing software to simulate and “look” as if they are HD. Even the Telepresence products of Cisco and HP are not necessarily better in terms of resolution and frame rate – they just charge you an arm and a leg for the rest of the set-up stuff (ie. Lights, walls, etc…) The true fact of the matter is that these telepresence products are bandwidth hogs and cost the end user more over the life of the product then the LifeSize with little appreciable difference in pure video/audio quality.

4. The Face to Face Live, Inc. Solution. Face to Face Live (www.f2fl.com) provides excellent affordable HD video conferencing and managed service products that fit into any budget. Dell might simply sell VC equipment along with their other products, but what they don’t offer is managed service. That is where Face to Face Live comes in. We handle all the service needed with VC so that the end client doesn’t have to. We believe that this is the future of the industry.

Face to Face Live was founded in Scottsdale, AZ in 2006 by Al Smith, an executive from the computer leasing industry who repeatedly saw a need for a videoconferencing “solution” that performed to his expectations. Al encountered companies spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on videoconferencing equipment that simply did not work. Face to Face Live researched and has put together the best equipment and managed services based round the award winning LifeSize’s (www.lifesize.com), the “Videoconferencing Company of the Year” for 2007, products.

The future of the video conferencing industry is affordable HD technology that allows for companies to reduce their carbon footprint, decrease travel costs to budgets, and increase employee productivity.