Acquisition of Xuggle

ConnectSolutions has completed the acquisition of Xuggle, a San Francisco company with incredible people and technology that will help us drive our vision of video-centric real-time collaboration.  If you are interested in learning more about Xuggle’s people and technology, I encourage you to take a look here for an FAQ and supporting material.  For the thousands of you working closely with Xuggler, the open source library for real-time video transcoding with Java, we are happy to announce continued support of the community to ensure you continue to build great things with the technology.

Real-Time Collaboration Platform

We are also very excited to announce the availability of the ConnectSolutions Real Time Collaboration platform.  This platform has been purpose-built to provide private-cloud deployments of real-time collaboration technology, including support for one-to-one, group, and broadcast collaboration.  You can learn more about this platform at the link above, as well as see a discussion we had this week with Paul Ritter, Vice President of IMS, on the subject of video-centric real-time collaboration, social media, and mobile platform delivery.

Telepresence.  These systems are beautiful, exciting, and so insanely expensive that even Fortune 100 companies can’t afford to put them where their employees do their work.

I had to take a three hour train ride, each way, to get to our closest telepresence system and participate in the discussion!

I heard that the other day, and simply had to chuckle.  Organizations are being sold on the “in-person” experience of telepresence, and the resulting increase in employee productivity while also reducing travel budgets.  Yet, these systems are so expensive ($500,000.00 or more, per room, plus monthly recurring fees to support the network infrastructure and maintenance of these complex systems), that even the largest corporations can’t afford to put them in each of their regional offices.  The scarcity of these systems in large corporations is rendering them counter-productive, and actually increasing the amount of travel for some employees like the one I referenced above.  The fact that employees in the field, strategic partners, and customers can’t participate in these experiences is just further insult-to-injury.

For the bitter employee above, there is a happy ending to the story given their investments with ConnectSolutions and our desktop-based web collaboration tools.

There are a number of exciting announcements happening at Adobe MAX this year, but one that is near and dear to ConnectSolutions is focused on Adobe LiveCycle Collaboration Service.  LiveCycle Collaboration Service is the new name for what was once Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (and for early followers, CoCoMo), and with today’s announcements, it is now commercially available in two forms:

• Multi-Tenant through Adobe’s hosting platform (you can learn more about it here)
• Single-Tenant (private cloud) through ConnectSolutions’ QuickConnect managed services platform)

Using the Adobe® LiveCycle® Collaboration Service, organizations can easily build and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) that include real-time, multiuser collaboration tools.  This means that your organization can explore opportunities to:

• Easily integrate text chat, whiteboard, webcam, and VoIP functionality.
• Rapidly build and deploy applications with the complete SDK.
• Manage user and session data.
• Host applications in a managed environment.

A datasheet is available here from Adobe on the overall capabilities of LiveCycle Collaboration Service.

I’m excited to announce the immediate availability of a new service from ConnectSolutions that enables a customer-collaboration solution designed to maximize sales initiatives, improve customer satisfaction, and deliver incremental contribution to the bottom line.  connectyou.me provides a real-time channel for customers, partners, and employees to reach the right people within your organization, and is based on the award-winning Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro.

The solution supports a variety of use-cases for online web communication, and provides a significantly differentiated service.  Prospects visiting your website or responding to an email campaign can collaborate in real-time with available sales representatives over the web to close business more efficiently. Customers requiring assistance can be connected to your support representatives for real-time incident resolution. Employees requiring assistance can be connected to internal help-desk resources for quick resolution to their questions or issues. connectyou.me provides a real-time communication channel to empower organizations to reach more people while making employees more productive at lower costs.

connectyou.me works with all deployments of Acrobat Connect Pro, including Adobe-Hosted, ConnectSolutions, and on-premise deployments.  The service integrates with existing CRM systems such as salesforce.com and Siebel to provide an integrated, multi-channel view of your customers, employees, or partners.

If you are interested in seeing the service in action, please feel free to view a demonstration, or visit connectyou.me for additional information.