TrueConf equips desktops, mobiles and meeting rooms with high quality video conferencing and collaboration capabilities. TrueConf apps and solutions utilizing state-of-the art technologies like scalable video coding and intelligent stream manipulation.
Techiexpert had a opportunity to interact with Dmitry, CEO of TrueConf , Lets talk to him on how they are addressing Video conferencing challenges with there innovative product and much more about there startup from the days of inception.
What is that one problem it solves?
Traditional video conferencing infrastructure often requires massive investments, dedicated IT staff and expensive upgrades. Along with its failure to scale up, it may pose a major problem for many businesses.
TrueConf solves this by providing video collaboration software that allows you to bring remote teams together, create a unified workplace environment and save money on infrastructure. Our solutions connect desktops, mobiles, phones, H.323/SIP endpoints and much more across your entire organization and integrate smoothly with your business workflow.
Background of founders, journey behind this idea
TrueConf was established in 2003 by graduates of State University’s computer graphics department. The idea was originally to build a SVC-based secure corporate unified communications system designed to work on low and unreliable channels or in LAN/VPN.
The project attracted a number of local companies and state educational organizations, who required on-prem video conferencing solution. Having obtained our first customers we were listening closely to make sure that our users are satisfied and collected their feedback to outline the new features and enhancements to be added in the next versions. Our customers helped us shape our marketing and product strategy for the upcoming years.
Idea & motivation to be productive?
Our main motivation to create our own software video collaboration platform:
- Create unique value. We wanted to produce unprecedented and unique solution which drives real value at the video conferencing market.
- Save money and efforts. Traditional video conferencing infrastructures is extremely difficult to deploy and maintain and almost impossible to scale. We have created TrueConf with our customers in mind and ensured that transition to our solution is smooth and easy for administrators and regular users.
- Give control over your personal information. Our solution is designed for companies and organizations which would like to take full control over their communications. TrueConf provides them with an opportunity to store their personal information at their site and restrict third-party access.
What’s their USP (unique selling point)
TrueConf is easiest to setup and maintain on-premises video collaboration solution on the market, which can be deployed in 15 minutes and doesn’t require special skills or integrator services.
TrueConf offers great video conferencing experience: 4K video calls, 8K video conferences, custom video layouts, up to 36 participants on-screen, up to 250 in conference and multi-screen support.
TrueConf provides a secure self-hosted video conferencing platform with five security levels, which can operate in LAN/VPN or in unstable Internet conditions.
And we are a lot more than just video: every TrueConf application is a ready-to-use unified communications app with built-in presence, contacts, telephony, chats, ad-hoc conferencing and much more.
Early days struggle
We managed to gain popularity on our local market rather quickly for a number of reasons:
- Video conferencing market of CIS countries is not very competitive: there are only a few local video conferencing vendors.
- Laws governing the information technology sector and software import restrictions put imprints on the choice of video collaboration solutions available.
- MCU-less setups have become more and more popular, giving rise to software video conferencing solutions supporting scalable video coding.
Entry into the global market was however accompanied with certain complexities. The global market is highly competitive, and establishing, maintaining and growing a business in this climate is a challenge. We have put a lot of effort into launching SEO and PR activities, creating channel partner network in new countries, publishing articles, tutorials and educational videos.
Eventually we have found our market niche and find potential user base, which resulted in growing virality of our meeting solution globally. It appeared that TrueConf is a perfect fit for those customers who prefer to take full control over their communications and restrict third-party access to confidential internal data while enjoying high quality video collaboration features.
With cloud offerings, data safety is at risk. Clouds are necessarily managed by third parties, and the risk that unauthorized people can have access to your most private data is real.
Additionally, by deploying the servers on premises, IT teams can tightly manage the available bandwidth and quality of service to deliver the experience their users expect.
User base they have achieved till now
Our portfolio includes over 10,000 successful deployments for government, education, financial institutions, and SMBs all around the world. Tens of thousands of organizations are using free version of TrueConf video conferencing server software every day.
Freemium model has proven to be an effective tool for lead generation and revenue driving strategy, resulting in high conversion rate. Thanks to wide spreading of TrueConf meeting solutions we have collected a large multicultural client base. Today our main markets are CIS countries, the U.S., India, Vietnam, and Europe.
New areas to focus on
Spanish is quite a popular language among our user base, which is why we want to expand our reach to LATAM countries. To bring TrueConf to new markets, we are doing a number of activities: localizing our articles and knowledge base to Spanish, hiring Spanish-speaking sales managers and technical support agents, launching Spanish version of our website. We want to give our new users and customers a smooth and authentic experience with our products.
Future plans
Embedded video. We believe that embedded video conferencing will continue to drive video conferencing market by enabling video in many new fields, not just rooms, PCs or mobiles. We already have various SDKs and APIs for our server and endpoint solutions, which are used by many customers around the globe.
To make video chat applications development more affordable, we have released SDKs for Apache Cordova, Microsoft Xamarin, and Facebook React — popular application development frameworks for building Android/iOS applications. In the following years we are planning to bring video conferencing to these platforms, as they enable our customers to develop their in-house applications without considerable expenses on Android/iOS developers.
Finally, we believe it is important to provide extensive real-time APIs to access meeting details and context. This approach gives third-party developers everything they might need to create over-the-top services such as speech recognition, meeting minutes extraction, timeline annotations, etc.
Team collaboration. We are putting a lot of effort into transforming TrueConf Server from unified communications platform to premises-based team collaboration platform. TrueConf Server 5.0 release scheduled for 2020 should bring some important features such as persistent group chats, multiple login support, automatic roaming calls between the servers, transfer between room PC and mobiles and much more.