We last spoke with Daryl Hutchings, CEO of Collaboration Squared, a few months ago to get the scoop on his newly released Ubiety offering. Ubiety is a great example of a service provider adding value to an existing cloud video platform (Ubiety leverages Acano) in order to create a full turnkey VCAAS offering. We touched base with Daryl recently for a quick update.
While I am not at liberty to share the names of Daryl’s clients, I can say he is very pleased with initial uptake and adoption. In response to the demand he is seeing, he has updated the website at ubiety.me, with interactive chat support to help potential customers easily get signed up for a free trial. A new company video (shown above) describes the basic features and benefits of the Ubiety service.
We discussed my recent write-up of Cisco’s new Project Squared. Many Acano partners see this move by Cisco as validation of the appeal of persistent chat based workspaces. I’ve understood the value of ‘project based group chat’ since the original mIRC days, and the recent success of commercial apps like Slack and Hipchat are just more evidence of this trend. For Daryl and Ubiety, its nice to be riding one of the hotter trends in visual collaboration.
Daryl brought me up to speed on recent developments at Ubiety. In addition to the new website and video, Ubiety now offers an “on-prem node” for customers. This will keep local calls from needlessly bouncing through the public internet, which could potentially improve quality and save costs. Of course, even with the on-prem node, the internet is still available for overflow use, and to connect with external callers. Daryl also noted that the recent Skype changes resulted in Ubiety now supporting Skype video calls. I’m very interested to see what impact, if any, this will have on services like Ubiety.
The goal as always is the more our customers collaborate, the more we can enable rich collaboration for those who need it most. – Daryl Hutchings
Finally, we talked about Collaboration Squared’s expanded charity initiative. Customers can feel good while collaborating, knowing that Ubiety will match their minutes, by giving an equal number of minutes to a worthy cause. Daryl spoke of new partnerships with charities (including the World Wildlife Fund and FWD.us), as well as new features allowing customers to choose who their free minutes go to.
