Earlier this month I met with John Coyle, the VP of Business Development and Strategic Marketing at LiteScape. The company is a VC-backed software company (funded by SoftBank) founded in 2003/4 timeframe with a focus of imbedding real-time communications into business applications. In many respects LiteScape is a leader among a small number of other companies focusing on this domain including Sphere and BlueNote Networks.
LiteScape has achieved impressive results in a short time for a startup. The LiteScape OnCast platform was introduced in 2005 and is the first Cisco-Webex technology partner. In fact, their relationship with Webex predates the Cisco acquisition. Instead of the usual 3-5 minute process of logging into various PC and then telephonic conferences to unite the voice and data requirements of a Webex meeting, the OnCast server allows a user to click a softkey of their IP phone that launches the browser on their PC and gets them into the conference – audio and web-wise!
This functionality is supported on both the Cisco brand phones, the Polycom phones and more recently the Avaya phones.
LiteScape has also been active in creating an Open Source project for desktop clients and a developer network. This is a creative way to exploit the desktop client that is most often a loss-leader for the service provider and was announced at Voicecon.
More significantly though, is how LiteScape is able to integrate call detail record-billing integration for both incoming and outgoing calls. Lawyers for example, years ago figured out how call detail records could be used to bill telephone calls to clients. When a lawyer makes an outbound calls, the user dials the number then at a series of prompts key codes the account and matter number into the PBX before the call is connected. This was a problem for incoming calls.
The big challenge that John spoke about though, is the difficulty of getting to the right people in an industry to change the work flow and business process.
