Rahul Sharma, Managing Director-India, LogMeIn: Harping on the Indian promise
COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the importance of online meeting solutions, which power work-from-home (WFH) and learn-from-home (LFH) culture. This has given great opportunity to companies including LogMeIn, which offers its online meeting & collaboration solutions. In an interaction with Md. Qaisar Alam of Digital Edge, Rahul Sharma, Managing Director-India, LogMeIn, talks about his company’s strategy for addressing the growing market around online meeting & collaboration solutions. Excerpts!
In what ways Covid-19 has expanded the market size of online meeting & collaboration globally as well as in India?
Yes, COVID-19 has meant a complete shift in how most businesses operate. All companies globally have had to reconsider the technologies they use during COVID-19 as we’ve moved suddenly to full-time remote working.
So, the demand for the real-time collaboration has increased and organizations are collaborating with SaaS-based unified communications and conferencing platforms from all across the globe. Companies like LogMeIn have stepped up their game, seeing the shift from traditional work culture to work-from-anywhere culture. We believe that this is a change that will continue to stick around even after a vaccine is widely available as employees and businesses have already seen tremendous benefits in allowing employees a more flexible working environment. These benefits range from happier and more productive workers to cost-savings and even environmental benefits.
What are the verticals which have seen a massive surge in terms of demand for online meeting & collaboration solutions?
There are many sectors that have seen a massive surge in demand for online meeting and collaboration solutions. Sectors that LogMeIn caters include banking and financial services, telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, education and IT. There’s no one vertical seeing surge in demand though, and we’re seeing sales of unified communications and collaboration solutions from companies of all sizes and industries as most of the world needed to adopt remote working.
How big the market of online meeting & collaboration has become in the Covid-19 afflicted world as well as in India?
The online meeting and video conferencing market is gaining traction in the COVID-19 era in India as well as across the globe. Online meetings and collaborations are currently seen as the ultimate solution by organizations to connect with remote workers, customers, as well as employees, while preventing them from coming in direct contact with each other.
A recent report in March 2020 by Transparency Market Research predicted that cloud-based video conferencing software will dominate the software category in the video conferencing market, and that the global video conferencing market will nearly double over the next seven years. It calculated that the market will grow from $6.1 billion in 2019 to $11.56 billion by the end of 2027. This represents an 8.4 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR). The research states that there’s increased adoption among small and medium enterprises, increased growth of outsourcing business services and adoption is also faster as a result of a far more mobile workforce and more BYOD (bring your own devices) in work environments.
There has been a growing demand for video conferencing solutions to improve productivity and provide real-time, face-to-face interaction from anywhere. Technology vendors like LogMeIn are therefore developing new services to match customer expectations for enhanced features and integrated capability over connected devices.
What market-share do you expect to garner in the online meeting & collaboration segment in India by the end of 2020?
LogMeIn is currently empowering around 200 million customers on a daily basis. This makes us one of the top SaaS companies in the world. We’re driving billions of interactions and 20 million voice minutes per year, supporting tens and millions of users daily.
India is one of our largest growing user base of our products including GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar. Currently, the company is catering to solo entrepreneurs to very large enterprises. What the pandemic has shown is that people want a more flexible schedule and employers will need to continue to offer remote work tools in order to retain good talent and keep employees happy. This all bodes well for an increase in the need for tools like those which LogMeIn offers.
What are the online meeting & collaboration offerings you have for the market?
GoToMeeting is one of the most renowned platforms worldwide for online meeting desktop sharing, and video conferencing software packages that enable the user to meet with other computer users, customers, clients or colleagues via the Internet in real-time. Video conference platforms are playing a major role to make work easier and work culture flexible. Virtual meetings have made our work easy, while helping us discuss with the teams about projects on agenda.
GoToMeeting focuses on delivering a simple, intuitive end-user experience, while giving IT even more control over deployment, management, and security. The product includes a video-first meeting experience for up to 250 participants, industry-leading audio quality, a meeting hub, powerful meeting diagnostics, and additional AI-powered transcription capabilities. These features streamline collaboration with a faster, modern look and feel that’s consistent across web browsers as well as desktop and mobile applications. For larger meetings or virtual events up to 100K particpants, we also offer GoToWebinar.
In terms of efficiency, performance, and overall quality of video-voice, where do you position your company vis-à-vis your competition?
The company, as of now, does not have a single competitor who can compete with the comprehensive suite of offerings that we provide our customers beyond just video conferencing into remote support and access. This offers a great growth opportunity to us even if you consider cross-selling.
The company constantly works towards finding newer ways of collaborations. We make our products more robust and efficient by incorporating feedback from our customers and conducting constant R&D. Our products consume low bandwidth and can easily operate even in areas with low internet.
Do you serve the Indian customers from your own datacentres in the country?
Since March, LogMeIn has seen usage of its video conferencing, remote access and remote support product lines grow as entire populations shift to remote work and the number of users is increasing daily. Video conferencing and meetings usage has spiked as much as 10x over 2020 norms, LogMeIn remote access usage has jumped as much as 300 percent, and our remote support solutions were seeing 50 percent week-to-week increases in usage as IT teams across the world set the stage for their newly remote employees.
With this surge in product usage of our remote work solutions, we are focused on capacity validation. While all products are designed for scale, we have increased the volumes of activity they can support through adding extra servers, vCPU allocations, memory and network capacity. We have the luxury of operating Co-location data centers as well as a public cloud infrastructure, giving us great flexibility in processing locations. We operate in multiple countries around the globe, have no single point of failure in any location and have the opportunity to move traffic between centers without changing the regional controls over data residency.
Qaisar
