GB Kumar, Vice President – APAC, Prysm, in a conversation with CRN India, explains the key verticals for Prysm in India and the company’s strategy to differentiate itself from its competitors in this market. Here are some edited excerpts…
What is the direction the company is moving towards in terms of overall collaboration market, focus on India, and in a market dominated by LCD and LEDs?
We see a trend wherein companies, products and ecosystems are becoming global in nature and global companies are having more footprints in India, with India becoming an integral part of the supply chain, distribution chain or developmental chain. Hence, Indian customers are also turning global, including major tech giants. Most of the Fortune 1,000 companies are having their design, R&D and manufacturing base in India.
As companies are going global and becoming more aspirational, communication and collaboration have become the corner stones for business success. Hence, the workplace is evolving drastically. This can be linked to the evolution in the enterprise collaboration market as more and more millennials join the workforce. Hence, understanding collaboration needs of these millennials and trends that are impacting those needs is significant.
With Prysm Digital Workplace solution, you can share content, tools, and applications side-by-side, on a single, large digital canvas which lets all meeting participants view and interact with the same content simultaneously. This is a content driven, visual collaboration platform, providing relevant data insights. Prysm Digital Workplace can also integrate Cisco, Polycom or Skype for Business into the Prysm Digital Collaboration Solutions platform. Customers using Prysm benefit from an open, enterprise-grade solution that integrates with existing collaboration tools and scales to hundreds or thousands of users, while meeting advanced security requirements.
Today, data is not the issue, but how well a solution triangulates the information is a critical factor. This is where the usage of a large canvas becomes hugely instrumental as it gives you the big picture to take the right decision at the right time. Prysm has approximately 300 patents, pending and issued, related to LPD technology. Unlike the LCD/LED technology, Prysm video walls with LPD technology have no bezels. Prysm’s LPD technology is the ideal combination of size, resolution, and brightness, for a visual experience that helps reduce viewer fatigue, whether up close or at a distance.
Prysm’s technology ensures that this experience remains immersive and consistent all the way from board rooms, training rooms, huddle rooms and collaboration-on-the-go. You can have any number and type of content, application and live sources integrated and analysed side-by-side on a free flowing or structured way for achieving best outcomes. Additionally, our LPD 6K is the world’s most energy-efficient interactive touch display, using less energy than a hair dryer and 20 per cent less energy than competing LED and LCD solutions.
What are the key verticals for Prysm in India?
We have started the sales and marketing initiatives here for the past two years. We are now increasing our focus on banking, finance, Smart Cities/Command and Control Centre implementations and India’s top 1,000 companies for delivering the benefit of Prysm Digital Workplace platform. Manufacturing, IT services and banking are the three key verticals for us in India. We have now started to engage with the public sector. We have also announced our collaboration with Dell EMC for jointly tapping the Smart Cities opportunity in India.
What is Prysm’s go-to-market strategy in India and how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?
At Prysm, we work through our partners. We are working currently with a set of 20 partners who specialise in Unified Communications and Audio Visuals. We are also actively looking at signing up distributors and significant partnerships in the public sector. Adding leading channel partners is core to our strategy to increase our share in the growing Asia Pacific and Japan market. Our agreement with Vega Global highlights our goal to gain a larger share of the expanding collaboration market by increasing our multi-brand dealer base in the region.
Our patented Laser Phosphor Display (LPD) is the best indoor display experience provided by any company globally for large formats. This technology is implemented in displays ranging to a size greater than 100 inches. We provide that consistent performance through your preferred device (iPad, laptop, etc), irrespective of the users’ location, bandwidth, with solutions designed in a way that enhances productivity. Disparate forms of data can be presented alongside in real-time with the capabilities to mark and edit the data through live sources. The differentiating factor for us is the consistency, how we successfully establish consistency from boardrooms to meeting rooms to customer touch points, which can be applicable universally. Be it large format or small format, it can be mirrored between any number of locations through Prysm solutions on a thin bandwidth or on an unpredictable bandwidth.
Our solution allows everybody to simultaneously add, edit, move and annotate the content without passing out controls to each other. The data gets automatically stored and one can start where he/she left off. Another differentiating factor is that we are able to integrate our truly unique, large-format, immersive display technology into an equally unique and seamless collaboration software. At the same time, we are able to protect our customers’ existing investments by supporting any third-party display/ application that they might be used for collaboration. We provide a solution which ensures maximum RoI for our customers.
Going forward, what are your focused plans for the India market?
The industry is increasingly becoming more and more collaboration centric. Essentially, businesses are going global and collaboration is going to be essential for the success of the organisation. Moving forward, the focus should be on how to make that collaboration experience persistent and how do you continue to improve the experience, so that the newer workforce which is coming into the productivity paradigm – the millennials and the next generation of information workers – is enabled with a collaboration tool such that they find more compelling ways of being productive with. This is where Prysm solutions are designed in a way that are very easy to adapt. You will know how to use Prysm platform whether it is in room or a device. Then, making it devise agnostics, because with the new generation of workers, we see that they want to get their own devices. They want a workplace where there is no constraint of a particular device or operating system. For making this culture secure so that the data is not compromised, you want to have the best collaboration experience possible.
What is your assessment of the collaboration market in India in the near future and how do you see this segment evolve?
Today’s enterprises require collaboration solutions which can be easily tailored to each employee’s specific workstyle and preferences to increase meaningful engagement. Prysm addresses this critical market need as our collaboration solutions help customers transform their current workplace into a modern workplace, tailored to suit their specific
business needs.
A commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Prysm, highlights that 83 per cent of information workers want the right collaboration tools which can help them be productive regardless of the location and time. Looking at the statistics, the global collaboration as a market is expected to double by 2020 and India will be an important part of this growth. It is not only about the content collaboration market just doubling, an important point is how can we really provide the RoI from an innovation and business growth perspective to these companies. We feel that Prysm’s Digital Collaboration solutions have a great role to play and there is a significant opportunity for us in the market.
The next wave of growth in the enterprise collaboration and employee productivity space will come from innovation of a different level altogether. This is where the concept of digital workplace comes into the picture. It can help teams across the globe to create, share and save projects by combining applications, content, live sources, video and the web in an immersive, touch interactive canvas. Our long term vision for our customers is to deliver new capabilities which enable the value of a shared virtual infrastructure and the company is relentlessly focused on delivering differentiated and innovative technologies that are future ready as well as industry leading. Cloud will be at the helm of our portfolio. With users today wanting to access multiple programs at the same time and with 10x of digital content created every five years, cloud collaboration will become necessary in the coming years and Prysm addresses this requirement effectively.
