That represents up-sell opportunity for Zoom-and likely a large number of businesses with smaller budgets that could benefit from a relatively cheap offering like Neat. He notes that Zoom reported during its September earnings call that 466 customers spent at least $100,000 on Zoom in the previous 12 months, while Zoom counts more than 66,000 customers with at least 10 employees. To Romanoff, the analyst, the move could be more about Zoom’s effort to better monetize small business customers. Both executives trot out a 2018 statistic from Frost & Sullivan, that less than 5% of global conference rooms were video-enabled at the time, as proof of the market opportunity.
#Neat video conferencing android
Yuan compares Zoom’s potential with Neat to a different Apple product blending hardware and software, the iPhone, and the relationship between Zoom and Neat to Google, with its Android software, and how it partners with hardware makers like Samsung (confusing the comparison: Google also makes its own phones). “If Apple decided to build a conference system for the world, this is what they’d build,” Trollope says. Trollope’s not unbiased-he’s a former Cisco colleague of Winge’s and a personal investor in Neat-but he says that Five9 has operated every one of the major video-conferencing tools as part of its testing, and that a Zoom and Neat combination is the closest the industry has experienced to an iPod-launch-like moment. Another benefit: With the higher financial upside of a startup to dangle, Neat can attract higher-quality employees than it might were it part of a large business, Winge says.Īt Five9, a San Ramon, California-based call-center startup, employees have been testing a Neat device in one conference room that CEO Rowan Trollope says has become the most popular in the office because of the ease of Neat’s on-screen meeting controls. By supporting Neat as a stand-alone business, Neat can move faster and spend more on research and development, Yuan says.
#Neat video conferencing software
“We know customers need the best hardware and software combination, but that’s not our strength,” Yuan says. In an interview, Yuan says that Zoom’s investment is more about signaling its commitment and good intentions than a desire to eventually own the hardware itself. A second product, the Neat Board, will be available for preorder in January. Neat's first product for hosting Zoom video conferences, the Neat Bar, is now available for. By investing in Neat-and maintaining an option for Yuan to take a board director seat in the future-Zoom has committed resources and engineers to get involved in the manufacturing of hardware directly for the first time. “Zoom is the Switzerland of your communications platform,” says Bernstein analyst Zane Chrane. Until now, Zoom customers have only used true third-party vendors such as Dell and Logitech. A second product, Neat Board, including its own screen, hasn’t yet settled on pricing and will be available for preorder in January 2020.įor Zoom, the investment in Neat raises the question of why Zoom would change its longtime strategy of remaining fully hands-off and device-agnostic in its relationship with hardware. Its solution to work with existing screens like televisions, Neat Bar, is now available for preorder at $2,500. Neat’s plan for the foreseeable future is to sell exclusively to the Zoom customer base as an out-of-the-box solution for running Zoom meetings in conference rooms. Winge and longtime business partner Fredrik Halvorsen, Tandberg’s former CEO, invested in Neat through a financial firm they operate, Ubon Partners, and Winge joined as chairman. “Watching what Eric was doing with Zoom, democratizing video in a way that had never been done before, was very inspiring from the sideline.” “Eric almost tempted me to get back to this industry,” says Winge. He’d already been in touch with Yuan, whom he’d known from their shared Cisco backgrounds, about hardware possibilities. In an interview, Winge said he met the Neat team at the beginning of 2019. Winge previously helped sell two businesses to Cisco: Acano, an online meetings startup acquired in 2016 at which he served as CEO, and Tandberg, a teleconferencing company acquired in 2010, where Winge was an executive vice president. Neat comes from a team led by OJ Winge, who formerly led the collaboration business unit at Cisco in charge of WebEx. Zoom declined to disclose how much it had invested, but both companies say it did not take a controlling stake. Neat has about 50 employees, the startup says, and has raised $20 million overall. Zoom announced on Tuesday at its user conference that it had invested in Neat, an Oslo-based startup founded in early 2019 that makes hardware solutions to complement Zoom’s cloud-based meetings.
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