Rick Ono, the Chief Operating Officer of San Diego-based Telanetix, visited with Brockmann & Company in a telephone discussion centered around the company and its approach to the Telepresence market.
A couple of key facts:
- Employing 45 people
- Founded in 2000
- Telepresence offering launched in mid- 2006
- Publicly traded over the counter (OTC:TNXI)
- 2nd Quarter revenue is ~ $2 million, up from $0.5 M in 1Q07
According to Rick, the company addresses the key issue in video conferencing – 'ease of use'. Focusing on the Telepresence space, the company offers a comprehensive capability for cameras, microphones, speakers, monitors, furniture, software and network services.
Key features of the offering include the use of high quality endoscopic-type cameras that have no need for pan or zoom. According to Rick, the cameras are strategically placed to make the interaction with the folks on the monitors natural, as if they are there.
Also, there are no monitors showing the local signal being broadcast. Note that this is increasingly becoming an important feature of telepresence rooms. This is thought to remind people of being on camera instead of in a business meeting.
The company's key product is an open source-based server to coordinate session initializations, share work files, perform codec services and control the service in a point-to-point network design. There are no bridges involved, instead users use the powerful user interface to control sessions. The company also provides managed network services for about half of their customers, the other half of course, operating their own networks.
Overall, Telanetix is positioned as a provider of 'digital presence' products and services. Together with the company's VAR community focused on the USA, they seem certain to earn healthy market share in the MidMarket which certainly values room-based functionality as a means to enabling higher productivity and accelerated collaboration.
And if the 2nd quarter financial results are any indicator, the company is growing aggressively.
