Lifesize Uses Twilio SIP Trunking To Power Fastest Growing Product

Lifesize Uses Twilio SIP Trunking To Power Fastest Growing Product

Lifesize punches above their weight class, setting themselves aside from competitors. Their team of 350 people, provides industry-leading high quality video conferencing to 1,300 different companies and nearly 100,000 users in over 57 countries.

Lifesize’s commitment to the cloud, recognition of their strengths as well as what’s outside their wheelhouse, and integration with Twilio bolstered their ability to consistently deliver an amazing customer experience.

Learn more about Lifesize on Twilio.com/customers

Lifesize, a division of Logitech, is a global leader in video conferencing with more than 15,000 customers including Netflix, Thomson Reuters, and NASA. Founded in 2003 as an on-prem solution, Lifesize launched their SaaS offering in 2014, using Twilio Elastic SIP Trunks to instantly provision local dial-in numbers to customers around the world. With over 1,700 customers and 70,000 users in its first year, Lifesize Cloud quickly became the fastest growing product in company history.

The Challenge

By 2014, Lifesize had built an incredibly successful hardware based video conferencing business. But there was still a large segment of the market who weren’t able or interested in procuring on premise conferencing equipment for every conference room.

SMBs and enterprises were expecting their business tools to be delivered as software as a service with sign up and setup as easy as Gmail. There were no collaboration tools that provided that ease of use along with enterprise features, security, and uptime SLAs. This led to employees bringing their consumer communication tools into the office from Skype to Google Hangouts. Lifesize saw the market opportunity to provide an enterprise solution to this huge market and bet their business on it. Lifesize transformed themselves from a hardware first company to a software first company.

Michael Helmbrecht, Chief Product Officer at LifeSize, explained the goals of introducing a SaaS offering. “To make it simpler, more scalable, and more cost effective for customers to deploy video to every employee and every room. It enables this at a speed and scale that simply is not possible with a customer premise infrastructure model which was traditional in video.”

In building their SaaS offering Lifesize chose to partner with best of breed technology providers in order to focus on their core competencies. Lifesize Cloud was designed with a modular application architecture and was deployed in clustered, fault-tolerant nodes around the world. They chose IBM Softlayer to get access to a global footprint of data centers each of which are connected with 2,000 Gbps of connectivity in a private fiber-optic network. Similarly, Lifesize chose to use Twilio to get access to instant access to global phone numbers and the public switched telephone network. With Twilio they were able to easily provision the numbers they needed into their video conferencing service.

Why Twilio

Lifesize knew they needed to have global dial-ins from launch with Lifesize Cloud. They knew that setting up relationships with local providers in each country was not a feasible option. Contracts, number provisioning, legal hurdles, and capacity planning all would hinder the growth potential of a SaaS product. Michael Helmbrecht explained, “With Twilio, from day one we had local dial-in numbers for audio conferencing into our service in nearly 50 countries. To do that myself, it would have taken five years. I never would have done it. The ROI wouldn’t be there.”

Lifesize chose Elastic SIP Trunks for two key reasons: scalability and ease of integration. Scaling with Lifesize meant having a usage-based pricing model that mapped to their rapidly growing business, where they only paid for what their customers used. As that customer base grew rapidly they relied on Twilio’s international scale to expand into new geographies. They were able to purchase numbers around the world, provision trunks, configure those trunks to their SIP proxy servers, with a handful of API calls. Not only did this allow them to integrate PSTN connectivity into their solution in a matter of days, but as requests for new countries came in from customers and prospects they were able to meet those requests and expand their footprint and customer base in the same day.

Michael explained, “we partnered with Twilio for SIP Trunking because it is like getting voice connectivity from every carrier in the world with a pay-as-you-go pricing model. Plus, as we expand Lifesize Cloud services globally, we’re seeing a much faster time-to-market for adding voice capabilities in new countries because we no longer have to do any capacity planning, negotiate separate contracts or test individual connections.”

The Benefits

Lifesize Cloud, Lifesize’s third incarnation of a cloud video conferencing service and first to support dial in numbers, has been incredibly successful by all metrics. Lifesize, was able to easily add dial-in numbers with Twilio to almost 50 countries in under a month before launch of their service. “It had to be easy, that was a big value proposition for us. We’re not a massive army of engineers,” said Helmbrecht.

As a service and company differentiating by ease of use the first metrics is customer satisfaction and NPS survey both of which have been higher than Lifesize ever anticipated. Like any SaaS service they are also constantly measuring Cost to Acquire a Customer (CAC), Annual Recurring Revenue growth (ARR), and churn. Lifesize accelerated its sales cycle by up to 98 percent, reducing time-to-purchase from up to 60 days to a single day. After the first year of the product they are serving more than 70,000 paying users in more than 1,700 companies, making Lifesize Cloud the fastest growing product Lifesize has ever had. Safe to say their software transformation was successful.

To Learn More

To learn more Elastic SIP Trunking, visit our Elastic SIP Trunking product page.

Hear more from Michael Helmbrecht about Elastic SIP Trunking and lessons learned moving to the cloud.