Visual workplace solutions are today’s businesses need. These solutions are very helpful in enhancing the productivity of the company and it saves time also. Prysm Inc. is one of the key players in the market that provide visual workplace solutions and cloud based workspaces to companies. Mr. Kumar GB, VP-Asia Pacific, Prysm Inc. shared his thoughts with DT about the industry, company’s strength and challenges for them. Below are some excerpts:
DT: What are the current trends in communication market?
Mr. Kumar: From a global perspective there are two trends that we can foresee. First, everyone is looking at an enhanced productivity at a global level and that is driving the content collaboration conversations. This is a positive sign as we are in a phase where majority of the industries have already adopted, experimented, and understood the strengths and weaknesses of video conferencing driven collaboration solutions. Secondly, the business success has come from the talent that is resident in one location for organizations; moving forward we strongly believe that pooling of the talent across boundaries is what will give the next level of innovation and productivity.
Technology landscape has changed to tremendous extent over the years, when we look at the term collaboration, it’s a widely used word. If one is doing video conferencing; doing a phone call, using a chat tool, working together on a whiteboard, sharing an email or doing a WebEx, collaboration is happening. Even using a Dropbox is collaboration. There are hundreds of companies out there which are doing collaboration in one way or the other.
DT: What are the major challenges for companies managing workflow?
Mr. Kumar: One of the major challenges that many enterprises have faced is that they already have deployed existing collaboration technologies. In addition, there is a lot of information and data that needs to be managed through advanced collaboration solutions. To cater to them, we have announced integration with existing technologies. For example we have launched integration with Microsoft OneDrive for Business and Office 365, making it easier for our clients to work with Microsoft Corp. tools and applications. With this integration, enterprises are not only able to leverage their existing Microsoft investments but remain confident that their shared data is safe, secure and accessible where one left it.
DT: What role Prysm can play for companies in India to grow their business?
Mr. Kumar: We at Prysm believe in the concept of Visual Workplace. Anything we do, the experience moves along from meeting rooms to huddle rooms to a laptop or mobile phones or tablets the experience. We provide a standardized experience across the board. We offer a platform that allows users to do all of this, from video conferencing to content sharing on the same platform. Our solution allows one to freely interact, edit content and walk away, the data gets automatically stored and one can start where he or she left off. Also, Prysm is an agnostic platform, it is compatible with all hardware systems. So, all the investment that a client has already made, be it for video conferencing from Cisco or Polycom, our software works with it. Prysm brings all of this together which is not the case with anyone else.
The most important feature of our solution is that everybody can simultaneously add, edit, remove and annotate the content without passing out controls to each other. Regardless of the size of the company or industry, Prysm solutions update the workplace by enabling a new level of collaboration and efficiency.
Key benefits of Prysm Visual Workplace to businesses are listed below:
Prysm helps businesses achieve:
DT: What are the current plans of your company to have effective business growth in the market?
Mr. Kumar: In India, customers have really understood the type of ROI that they are able to provide their business stakeholders by adopting Prysm’s visual workplace solutions. Firstly, it has got more to do with the value that we are able to establish with our customers versus just being the lowest in terms of price point. The second aspect is that as it is a cloud based software as a service solution, we are not looking at a high capex investment from Day 1, it is usually spread out at a period of 3 years term and so on. The third aspect is that companies’ current investment into video conferencing and collaboration technologies, we provide investment protection which means that they all get seamlessly integrated into this unified Prysm visual workplace platform.
For us, the focus has been enterprise customers who are multinationals in India or large Indian companies who have a base globally. Majorly our operations are based out of Bangalore and we are expanding in a significant way (sales and hiring). We also have a dedicated team in Delhi NCR (Gurgaon) and Mumbai for upcoming demo centers in these cities. We are also looking at some other satellite cities. Additionally, we are also planning to enter the mid-sized company’s market and focusing on how we can assist the government operations in India. In the US, we are already providing our solutions for government projects, for an instance, NASA has extensively deployed our solutions, also top 5 government institutions are using our solutions. We are also present in other highly sophisticated locations like Russia, Middle East, China, and Europe etc.
DT: How do you plan to sell your solutions in India? Brief us about your distribution model.
Mr. Kumar: We have signed with a couple of channel partners in India and globally. Most of the fulfillment is done through channel partners, but we also have some direct customers. Recently, we signed with WWT, $8 billion dollar Channel Company and one of the largest channel partners in our business. We are also working with some other premium channel partners like AVI-SPL, Impianti, Pentatel, Polymedia, Smart AV and Yorktel.
DT: What are the future expansion and investment plans in India?
Mr. Kumar: We truly believe in the potential India has to offer, our business model combined with the ROI achieved by our customers are in line with Indian market scenario. In fact, few of our customers who implemented our solutions in India are also now customers in the U.S. and Europe. Though, the U.S. is still the fastest growing market for us, essentially because we have been there for long time, India could be the second largest market with respect to our software business.
Besides enterprises, the government sector in India also holds huge potential for us - with the push towards ‘Digital India’, special-purpose clouds and applications that focus specifically on connecting devices and machines; will drive our business momentum.
