One of the things that has struck me over the summer months is how globally we find our software has been deployed. A quick look over our most recent purchase orders shows VQ Conference Manager managing CMS deployments in the US Federal, Food, Health, Defence, Service Providers and Finance sectors, located in Hong Kong, Australia, Russia, Argentina and of course Europe and the USA.

All very exciting but what does this tell us? It is clear that there is no industry vertical leader in deployment of great collaboration tools anymore. With VQ Conference Manager we can help our customers deliver the service their users want, or have come to expect. Whether that is old school white glove concierge, through to the scalability that self-service enables. One of our largest deployments now reports 1 million + minutes a day, truly delivering on allowing users to determine how they want to use their tool set.

Back at VQ, and to keep pace, our team is growing. We have added software engineers, and are adding more through 2017. We also have a couple of major technology steps to announce later this year – think scale and accessibility. Our channel continues to grow, and deepen, with another shortly to join who adds something unique. Not a quiet summer by any means.

In what is becoming a regular travel update, I wanted to tell you about my latest trip: this time to the USA. On paper, the schedule looked gruelling: New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC and Orlando all in a week. But I actually got plenty out of the trip both personally and professionally.

Between customer visits in New York, I had time for some sightseeing (Empire State, Central Park, the 9/11 Memorial) and I appreciated for the first time the ubiquity and convenience of a certain ride-sharing service. I use it at home, of course, but it has only just started in my area and the sheer facility of it across the Pond is on another scale, not just in NYC but all over the US. It’s not an exaggeration to say Uber has revolutionised the taxi business. I think there are analogies here too, with the way VQ and CMS, with their scale and convenience, are enabling video conferencing to become a ubiquitous, self-service facility that people just ‘use’ without having to plan or book.

Then onto Philadelphia to give 2 days of training for one of our key US partners; product development, road map and answering specific customer queries. These sessions are a great opportunity to really understand how VQ Conference Manager is being used in real life situations. We believe that scalability and self-service are key drivers, and these sessions re-iterated for me the sense that we are hitting the mark on these, both now and with our product roadmap. Subsequent customer visits and product demonstrations built on this. It is always very pleasing to see VQ Conference Manager in use and to hear from customers how it is assisting the adoption of video and the associated benefits of this.

As an aside, I was also reminded several times of the adage about UK and US being two cultures separated by a common language as I was corrected on my pronunciation of “schedule”. This is a word one uses a lot during a demonstration of VQ Conference Manager and not putting the hard ‘c’ in it tends to get noticed.

Unfortunately, there was no time to see “The Rocky Steps” or the Liberty Bell as I was on a tight schedule (with hard ‘c’) to get to Washington. And from there to Orlando and the InfoComm 2017 trade show.

Infocomm is a great way to connect with partners and customers, see what is happening in the wider industry, attend the user groups and side meetings and feed this back into our roadmap and product development teams.

So to wrap up, all in all, a hugely rewarding trip. I see the UC industry as a whole, the video conferencing industry and VQ Communications in particular, continue to build momentum and deliver excellent collaboration solutions.

Now I’m back from the US, we’re planning our next programme of webinars. Watch out for further details in the next few weeks.

So, I’ve been at VQ for well over 3 months now and I thought I’d give you another update from me.

I hadn’t appreciated when I started, what a truly international business VQ Communications is. Giles spoke about his US trip in his April blog and my passport is seeing quite a bit of use, too. I was in Switzerland last week, visiting partners and customers to provide both training and supporting new Conference Manager deployments. I did a fair bit of travelling whilst there and as an aside, for anyone needing to use it, it’s a great train service from Geneva to Lausanne: comfortable, punctual and clean.

Next week Mike and I will be training a partner in Bulgaria and then I’m off to the US for an intense week of meetings culminating in the InfoComm trade show in Orlando. If you are going to be there, please let me know: I would like to meet as many customers and partners as I can.

But of course, there’s no need for everybody to get on a plane every time we need to meet. Not with the almost-as-good-as-being-there experience offered by modern video conferencing platforms such as CMS. At VQ we have partners and customers all over the world. South America, Australia, USA, Vietnam, India, South Africa come readily to mind but there are many more and we are in regular video contact with many of them. I am always reminded how much easier it is to communicate, (especially where not everyone is using their first language), when you can actually see who you’re talking to.

Then there are the webinars that I run. These are timed to accommodate as many time zones around the world as I can and they do always feel like very international events. You should be receiving the invitation for the next webinar soon, by the way, so please make sure you register. The feedback I receive is positive and it’s a great opportunity to catch up with the latest VQ news.

We are indeed seeing huge demand from all over the world, and we have the tools and capability to service our growing list of international customers and partners from our home base in Chippenham, Wiltshire.

I look forward to welcoming many more worldwide users to the VQ customer base. Exciting times indeed. More from me again after my next trips.

We’ve been making great progress here at VQ since I last spoke to you about our Partner Programme back in October.

Last week we were delighted to announce that Perfect Wave Technologies had become our Master Distributor in the US. Alongside Perfect Wave, we are really pleased to welcome West Telco, Transition Systems and 8 other partners to the VQ family who are located across the globe.

It’s an exciting time here at VQ. We have ever-growing resources for our Resellers, available via the VQ Portal. New members of the team have also joined.  They come to us with years of invaluable experience working with this technology and are experts in their fields.

I look forward to updating you over the coming months with more Reseller and Partner news on this VQ journey.

5^th May 2017: Perfect Wave Technologies and VQ Communications sign Master Distributor agreement for the USA.

UK based VQ Communications are a leading supplier of management software for video conferencing and unified communications. Acano Manager 2 is deployed globally and hosts some of the largest Cisco Meeting Server deployments.

Located in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, USA, Perfect Wave Technologies, are a team of skilled experts in the video collaboration market who offer products and services that allow customers to utilize their existing collaborative investments and cohesively integrate new technologies. Perfect Wave’s team of experts knows how to design and implement easy-to-use video conference rooms, and how to provide training and support that help clients make the most of their investment.

“Perfect Wave Technologies is extremely excited at the opportunity to partner with VQ Communications and act as their Master U.S Distributor.” says Rick Green, President of Perfect Wave Technologies. “As a service organization dedicated to enhancing our partners customer service offerings, we believe the VQ solution fills a significant void in the market place by truly optimizing previously purchased Acano solutions as well as new CMS deployments through their management and monitoring software.”

“We are delighted to be working with Perfect Wave” states Mike Horsley, CEO, VQ Communications, “their extensive knowledge of the Cisco Meeting Server and their track record of enabling customers to successfully deploy this technology makes them a fantastic partner.”

I started at VQ Communications in March and although I’d previously experienced working with a global technology company I was excited to join a company where there is a focus on ‘big’. For our conferencing management software, this means staying ahead of our clients who already have some of the largest deployments of video and audio conferencing, based on the CMS platform. This focus on scale has both tactical and strategic implications for UX.

UX needs to use design patterns for filtering, sorting and searching that are resilient to large volumes of meeting and calls data. Scale creates challenges that are usually only revealed when talking to users. For example, users often leave the default call name, making auto-complete search tricky when there are hundreds of calls all called ‘New Call’. Email search patterns provided a useful starting place for the challenges of volume searches.

One client now makes approximately one million minutes of video and audio conference calls a day. Volume on this size is exciting for UX as it means finding new ways to reveal the most important aspects of the data so that operators, can view both correct and meaningful data they require to monitor and support growing amounts of calls– quite a challenge. Acano Manager 2.0 had already introduced the idea of Dashboards and Analytics long before I joined. So now it’s interesting to start to think about some daily monitoring tools that support user goals moving from managing individual meetings to monitoring hundreds or even thousands of meetings.

What’s next? Well, I’ve barely scratched the surface in understanding the UX challenges and opportunities that ‘big’ brings. But I’m excited about pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with conference management. More from me again in the coming months as I continue on this exciting UX journey.

If you’re technically minded and interested in the path to big, read our CEO’s blog ‘The path to big’, where he talks about how we use Microsoft’s open source software platform to increase the resilience of the Acano Manager software.

I was able to spend the last 10 days in the USA attending Enterprise Connect in Orlando, a day with our new USA Master Distributor in Philadelphia the team and their customers, and a series of client meetings in New York.

Enterprise Connect was the former Voicecon event, and has grown from the IP telephony focus and advertises itself as The Communications & Collaboration event. There were around 200 exhibitors and several thousand visitors – of which 50% seemed to be End Users

The recurring theme from the show was all about Teams and how to enable the users who represent the massive growth in the gig economy and the demand for flexible working. During the Microsoft keynote, we heard a statement that over 60% of the workforce will be remote workers by 2020. One of our customers deployed Acano during 2016 and has seen the service explode – regularly seeing over 1 million minutes a day. That success is about enabling teams to collaborate with the tools they need in a way that replicates, how they want to work. We are especially pleased to be a part of that success story.

It was also good to catch up with industry stalwarts:

We are steadily adding partners around the globe, and see this is key to our growth strategy. The road trip to Philadelphia and New York was all about growing and consolidating our partner base. One of the new partners we are working with previously supported Acano in North America. They add great experience and knowledge, are a great team, and are also fun to be around.

I’ve come back from this trip with a real buzz. For VQ, we’re in the right space, right time and with the right product. As ever, it’s foot on the floor time to keep building on this success.

Hi, I’m Barry Pascolutti and I’m the latest addition to the VQ team as their Lead Sales Engineer.

I write this at the start of my 6^th week since joining VQ Communications Ltd and what a month or so it has been.

I was a Collaboration SE at Cisco at the time of their acquisition of Acano last year and I was tasked with becoming expert in Acano technology. It soon became apparent that to truly unleash the power of the Acano server at any scale, some sort of management platform is necessary that can utilise the Acano API. And researching that is when I first became aware of VQ as they absolutely tick that box.

I’ve joined the company at a really exciting time.

Alongside 2.1 MR4 which has just been made available to all customers , VQ are just about to release the highly anticipated version 2.3 of Acano Manager with support for Cisco Multiparty licensing. I remember when Multiparty was first introduced. The change from port-based to meeting-based licensing was regarded as something of a paradigm shift and was welcomed by many. It was logical to extend this licensing scheme to the Cisco Meeting Server but ensuring the correct license is consumed and keeping track of license usage is an important concern for the administrator. So I believe this will be a much-used feature of Acano Manager.

A key part of my Sales Engineering role has been hosting customer demos. The demos not only allow me to put a face to the name in the email address but to build up relationships with customers. Over the past 5 weeks I have enjoyed hosting a bunch of demos to customers all around the globe and have witnessed a good number of deals being signed off during my short time here.

I’m home based and typically spend more time working from there than in the office. The team as a whole is dispersed around the UK (and further afield) with a small group based in the main office; every Thursday those based more locally come in and the office is full and we enjoy a “brown bag lunch” from the local farm shop – really tasty.

What’s really clear though is how video (CMS based) and tools such as Slack, Github and a team that knows what it’s doing can work really efficiently together. It’s a business that simply couldn’t have existed without video calls and a big fat pipe. The whole world really is just a click away.

VQ itself is a dynamic, vibrant company whose people share a genuine passion and enthusiasm for what they’re doing. This shines through not only in the product but also the day to day office atmosphere.

I look forward to my next trip to Chippenham with relish and keeping you up to date with my VQ journey.

ISE 2017 redux – it’s the cloud stupid!

OK so nothing surprising then (!) It’s all about delivering services via the cloud and the subscription revenue model.

Let’s recognise the show for what it is though, the UC section is a tiny portion of the RAI facility with the key areas taken up by the increasingly bright screens and projectors.

Call me jaded, but walking past yet another curved display – isn’t this just like 3D TV – a solution looking for a problem to solve? And all those displays started to believe you would need to wear sunglasses to use them.

Hall 11 of the show was packed with companies talking about, and providing evidence that the cloud is now the major delivery mechanism for customers to connect. A smattering of black boxes and end points – a 4k Endpoint for $200’s! But mainly lots of 42” monitors proudly showing impressive network topologies.

Cisco dominated the event with a huge stand, and pride of place was the Sparkboard. It was also great however to see Videxio, AVISPL and Starleaf alongside Pexip investing in the event.

It was also good to see the Lifesize Alumni Simon Dudley, Jon Tracey, Andreas Weinold and Mike McCarthy at the show with the new briefs.

So that leads me to why go to ISE?

Like InfoComm, and a lesser degree Enterprise Connect, with one flight you can have 20 meetings. It becomes a magnet for scheduled, and walk up meetings. In a day and a half I squeezed in three scheduled formal meetings, and numerous “catch ups” with partners, customers and industry influencers.

Next stop, for me, Enterprise Connect at the end of March. No doubt I will meet the Lifesize boys again!

Giles Adams