This webinar presented by VSGi and Pexip features a brief overview of the Pexip cloud and on-premise video conferencing solution. Its enterprise-grade security and interoperability with both legacy video conferencing end points and new cloud platforms like Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and Google Hangouts make Pexip one of the most versatile video conferencing solutions for distance learning.
Click here to contact your MEEC contract specialist at VSGi
About Pexip
- A global leader in interoperable video conferencing.
- Merged with Videxio in 2019 (Pexip is still listed on the MEEC contract as Videxio)
- Currently has 230 employees, 3,600 customers, and operate in 190 countries
- Went public in May 2020 on the Oslo Stock Exchange
- Visionary in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant
- Frost & Sullivan Award for entrepreneurial company of the year
- Washington Business Journal award for best place to work in Washington, DC
Pexip Features
Multiple Collaboration Modes
- Traditional online meetings – host up to 100 people per online meeting. The meeting organizer has a complete set of meeting control settings – access passwords, open/close meeting, muting participants, optional recording, etc.
- One to one ad hoc meetings – users can reach out individually to each other any time for quick real-time collaboration
- Live and recorded streaming – leverage streaming video platforms like YouTube, Facebook to invite an unlimited number of meeting participants to a view-only live stream.
Interoperability
- Connect via legacy standards-based equipment or popular cloud-based services like Microsoft Teams, WebEx, or Google Hangouts Meet
- Desktop and mobile users can access via the downloadable Pexip app or simply type the meeting URL into any modern browser
Deployment Flexibility
- Choose cloud-based or a self-hosted highly customizable on-premises version
Enterprise Grade Security
- JITC certified, FIPS 140-2 encrypted, and supports HIPPA compliance
Maryland Customer Examples
Laureate Education
- Have over 875,000 students in 85 universities at 150 campuses around the world
- Leveraged Pexip to leverage their existing Poly room systems for the transition from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams
Maryland Department of Juvenile Services and University of Maryland School of Psychiatry
- Leveraged the Pexip platform to connect aging Poly HDX video conferencing equipment to the Google Hangouts Meet platform
VSGi [Music]
00:12 Rahsaan Wood: So gonna turn it over to you Tamara and Patricia
00:17 Patricia Collins: Oh okay, so let me start by saying good morning to everyone, so new members that are on the call, thank you for logging on this morning. Please welcome visual systems group incorporated, better known as the VSGi. Last time VSGi gave us a great presentation and I am sure they are going to do the same this morning. Your topic this morning will be distanced learning in a time of crisis and it’s presented by VSGi and Pexip. I hope I did that right. Hoster will be Rahsaan Wood, commercial inside sales rep and Rahsaan I’m gonna turn it right over to you to introduce your presenters I know the presenters were changed.
01:05 Rahsaan Wood: So there was a little bit of a change, this morning it will be myself, Rahsaan Wood with VSGi Manoja Wimalkantha is the sales manager and the moderator she will be handling the chat functionality, from the Pexip side we’re joined with by Ken Shorts and Darin Folb, so before I’ll allow them to do their own introductions but just as we get started here I just want to say good morning and thank you all so much for taking the time out of your busy schedules, this morning to join us for the second instalment of the VSGi distance learning in a time of crisis webinar series for MEEC members. Before we begin I would just like to say once again thank you all to all the members for the continued commitment to educating our children even through these unprecedented times, and as we all continued to wade through these uncertain times and plan for our next steps many educators and administrators throughout the country are determining solutions and trying to prepare for the possibility that distanced learning at least in some form will be a part of the new norm.
02:10 This morning we are presenting Pexip for your consideration. Pexip is a video conferencing platform that caters to educators looking for a platform where they can securely conduct class lessons and administrative meetings end to end. An agnostic platform that provides interoperability and a native experience for their existing platform such as Google meets, Microsoft Teams and others and finally a seamless and easy to use platform where they and their foreign users can bring their own devices and join a meeting as we have done this morning we have a PAC subservice.
02:44 We would like to thank MEEC, Tamara Perchyonok and Patricia Collins along with Jefferey Miller from Towson University for allowing VSGi and Pexip to host this webinar, for the members, we just wanted to you know, before we kinda get started and going down this path with this webinar we just wanted to let all the MEEC members know that if you look currently on the MEEC website, Pexip is not currently listed it is actually currently listed on our hard work contract the VSGi hard work contract with MEEC as Videxio and the reason for that is that in the last year Pexip and Videxio merged into one company but it has not yet been updated on the MEEC website but it is currently available as Pexip as a solution, and will be updated by name on the contract by January of next year.
03:33 If you have any questions about that please feel free to let us know during the chat during the Q & A or after we can definitely assist you with that so, with that intro let’s go ahead and get started just with some a few quick housekeeping notes presentation is being recorded, so if you have any questions please we ask if you can hold until the end of the presentation we will give everyone an opportunity to ask presenters at the end any questions they might have, and also like I said at the beginning there Manoja she’s handling the chat functionality for the webinar, so if there is any questions during the call and you might not be able to be there for the very end at the Q & A feel free to send us the questions in the chat and they definitely will be answered, as well questions comments at the end feel free to reach out to us at MEEC.VSGi.com.
04:19 So if we can go on to the next slide, so we’re gonna go ahead and real quick just introduce our team, so from the VSGi side um there is myself Rahsaan Wood I’m VSGi, MEEC specialist as well as commercial inside sales rep.
04:34 I am your main point of contact at MEEC for any MEEC quotes, projects that you guys might have any questions about video conferencing or audio-visual I’m one of your main points of contact I’m on this you see my phone number as well as my direct contact the rwood@vsgi.com is my direct email, but below that as well as our meec@vsgi.com alias, where there is a team of individuals ready to support you guys with any questions audio visual, video conferencing that you might have, to the right from as well from the VSGi side I introduced you guys a little earlier but,
05:06 Manoja Wimalkantha is the VSGi Sales Director slash sales manager that’s her direct phone number as well as her direct email address and she can as well be reached at the meec@vsgi.com alias, so from that I will go ahead and turn it over to Ken and Darin to introduce themselves and get us kicked off with this presentation.
05:25 Ken Short: Yes good morning I’m Ken Short I’m the Pexip director for enterprise solutions for the mid-Atlantic region, soon to be called the Southeast region and my cohort that keeps me from fibbing to anybody is Darin. Darin is our Solutions Architect he’s my right-hand man he takes care of all the technical questions and I go out and find great people like you to talk to.
05:53 So who is Pexip? So Pexip started back in 2011, if you recall there used to be a company called Tandberg and that company called Tandberg was acquired by cisco, when cisco acquired Tandberg, there were three companies born two of which I believe Rahsaan has already mentioned, which was Pexip and Videxio and then another one called Acano.
06:20 Acano was acquired by Cisco, Pexip and Videxio moved forward Videxio being the Pexip as a service and, Pexip itself was the engine behind everything. We’ve got close to 230 employees today, over 3,600 customers we reached over 15,000 cities and 190 plus countries, worldwide.
06:48 What we’re very proud of is the fact that we’re at 99% retention rate of all of our customers and those customers seem to be growing quite a bit during this time frame in our, history with the pandemic.
07:03 The great news was last week we did something fantastic [bell sounds] we rang a bell and out in an Oslo Stock Exchange and we have gone public so we are traded publicly over in Oslo Norway where our corporate headquarters is.
07:22 Pexip has been recognized for the last two or three years in, rags such as the 2019 Gartner magic quadrant, for a visionary as far as our technology and our transcoding capabilities to be an interoperable, play in the industry today along with all the others that are in there.
07:47 We also this year received the Frost & Sullivan award for entrepreneurial company of the year and then, which was amazing to us our corporate headquarters in the Americas is in Herndon, Virginia and we were voted by the Washington Business Journal, the best place to work in the Washington DC area, so and everybody’s young I’m one of the, I’m the oldest so it, I just go with the flow with these young kids anyway.
08:19 What’s our mission? Our mission is to empower people to be seen and to engage each other in a better way we want to make sure that the video quality and the collaboration that you use from Pexip is is bar none the best in the industry.
08:38 Our vision is to make sure that virtual meetings are the easiest things to get in and out of at any time and our promise is we want to meet the world.
08:49 We want everyone to be using our product we want everyone to freely think of video as the next communication rather than using a cellphone or a phone and talking, versus seeing and being seen.
09:08 What are we famous for, Pexip is famous because hey we take anybody’s product that’s out there in the industry and we give you interoperability to those different products so whether it’s a collaboration tool from WebEx or Google or Microsoft or an endpoint Francisco, Polycom, Lifesize or BlueJeans we don’t care, what we’re going to do for you is underneath everything we’re going to transcode all of the things that you want to connect to.
09:43 Another thing that we are is a WebRTC type of software package where you don’t need to download an app you can go right to a WebRTC using any of the ones depicted here Safari, Firefox, Google or Edge and achieve a video conference with the quality that you’re seeing today.
10:11 We are best-in-class in Interop, for Microsoft we’ve been working very closely with Microsoft for the last seven years and we’ve developed a rapport that our developers are side-by-side with the Microsoft teams developers so when they come out with, a new capability feature or a function, our team already knows about that feature or function and has been working closely with their developers so that we can implement that instantaneously.
10:42 We also have a unique partnership with a company called Google so we are the only ones out there in the industry that can allow for any endpoint Polycom, cisco whatever to communicate with a Google meet presentation or meeting, we tie into both G Calendar, the Google Calendar, we also can tie into outlooks calendar and give you a OneTouch join capability.
11:18 The cool thing is everything that we’re talking about here, either you get it in a self-hosted or an infrastructure, scenario that you have today or if you’re going to the cloud Pexip allows you to do either/or and what that does for you is it gives you the capability for all of that infrastructure that you have today can be tossed out I don’t like to say tossed out but we can implement a are all your call controller management so your firewall traversal all of the infrastructure that you’ve got currently present can go away and, we can either place one of our products into your infrastructure if that’s the way that you want to go or we can allow for call control or management through our Pexip as a service.
12:13 The one thing that we just introduced was OneTouch join for all meetings so it makes no difference if you’re using Polycom or Cisco, we or Microsoft teams any of the listed, vendors that are on this slide you have the ability to do a OneTouch joint so you can walk into a conference room and we’ve already scraped the calendar so we know what conference you’re about to attend and all you need to do is touch the green button and bada bing bada boom you’re in, as I said before we have two types of solutions we have an enterprise application which is a self-hosted, cloud of your choice so we can put our software into your infrastructure and or we can give you a hybrid solution which means that if you’re using Google or Microsoft Azure or AWS as your cloud you can actually put our software in those data centers to allow you to, free up the IT infrastructure people that are necessary to manage and deploy it.
13:23 We, the cool thing about the enterprise application is we can customize the experience for you we have third party APIs that you can tie into it and other features that normally you don’t see in other bridges or MCUs as we call them.
13:44 The other alternative, of course, is the Pexip as a service which is a global service we have a 99.9% service level agreement and it’s an out-of-the-box experience so all you’re doing is subscribing to our global service and we offer state-of-the-art video quality at 768 or 1080p and we allow you to share at the same 1080p HD video quality.
14:17 Some of the use cases and it was, this was kind of hard for me to come out and talk about, but I wanted to reference two accounts that we have in the Maryland area.
14:31 Laureate education they’ve got over 875,000 students in 85 universities at 150 campuses around the world they were a Skype for business company using Polycom Skype for Business room systems and they were old and antiquated they wanted to move out of Skype for business over to Microsoft teams and so what they decided to do was they started testing out products that could get them their PolyComs or their Cisco endpoints into a Microsoft teams meeting, and they tried a couple of our competition and the competitors seem to fail because they just couldn’t share documentation and they called us Microsoft actually brought us in we actually did the requirements that were necessary to win this business and now we’re slowly but surely rolling this solution out where they use Cisco rune kits and then they integrate Microsoft teams in every one of their locations, so we’re slowly pulling that out we had just started before COVID hit so, we’re hopeful that like the June-July timeframe we can kick that off again.
15:58 And then the other one was a Maryland Department of Juvenile Services which is in concert with University of Maryland School of Psychiatry, well what they were looking for is they’ve got older Polycom HDXes they wanted a way to connect those Polycoms to a Google meet type of meeting where the nurses and the psychiatrists were meeting with the juveniles that were in the adult detention centers around the state and we ran a test, a couple tests and, they loved us so much that they went ahead and had started the first phase now they’re rolling it out to about 82 other Polycom endpoints and we’re incorporating the Google meet capabilities along with that, so basically I think I covered it in less than 20 minutes and I apologize for going so fast but hey we went everywhere and we want everyone to be able to use video communications from Pexip because it’s easy it’s easy to use it’s given you business quality audio and video it’s giving you the capability to share documentation at an HD level and it’s flexible so hey look you’ve already got your distance learning rooms set up you need that capability to give the students, to achieve interoperability so if they’re using Google meet and you want to get into that, that classroom you can use Google meet you can you zoom you can use whatever you want and get into the classroom that’s what Pexip brings to brings to the table.
17:53 We’re fully interoperable we do all of the transcoding underneath the, as I call it underneath the hood so you don’t see Pexip all you see is that we have connected you to whatever else you needed to connect to and that’s it.
18:12 Any questions?
18:13 Rahsaan Wood: So Ken this is Rahsaan can you speak to the some of these so there’s been some concerns with some of the video conferencing platform out there right now as far as security could you maybe speak to some of the protocols in place to protect that crucial information and whatnot for our members.
18:32 Ken: yes I will give you, a synopsis and then if we want to dig into the weeds we can do that with Darin but our product is being used by the Department of State or excuse me the Department of Defense it’s part of DISA’s rollout of a new video communication solution for all of DoD. Basically, in order to get in the door with DoD you have to go through what they call a certification, that certification allows you for a, you must be FIPS 140-2 encrypted and certified and you must meet a stringent compliance of the government which is done down at Fort Huachuca and it’s with a group of people called JITC.
19:27 If you can get JITC certified you are placed on what they call the approved products list that, approved products list gives you the capability to call on anybody in the government and sell your product.
19:42 Our self-hosted product is that JITC certified product were also HIPAA standard we’re also ISO 27001 certified and compliant as a company so we take security with great, great seriousness, we in our Pexip as a service that you’re on currently we do not capture any information this stream and this recording is being recorded to a third-party recording, company, could be YouTube could be Facebook could be anything in that realm or it could be something of a hardware product that you have in your infrastructure and all we do is point this call toward that, that product and it captures the information so basically, we’re unlike anybody else in the industry we don’t collect information, at all once this is done all the chat and questions that were part of this conference, call they go in the trash.
20:53 Everything that we’re doing here right now the presentation I just gave you goes in the trash we don’t keep anything and that’s part of our security policy Darren you want to elaborate anymore.
21:06 Darin Folb: So yeah so we have obviously you mentioned you covered most of it we have user-based controls, host pins, guest pins, the ability lock conferences things like that those are always important and then we also have the infrastructure type security the backend security, built-in within software as a service but if you wanted to take it to the next step obviously something that almost no one else in the industry really offers is you can deploy it on Prem in your own environment and then you’re basically as secure as your own environment so and some customers actually don’t want access to anybody on the internet they just want internal-only videoconferencing and we can provide that as well with that self-hosted approach.
21:45 Robert Davidovits: Perfect Ken I’ve got a question for you, you mentioned a couple times in your presentation Google meet, is how does Google meet and Google hangout are those the same thing or those two separate things I know a lot of educational institutions are using Google Hangouts for their conferencing means.
21:59 Ken Short: Yeah it’s either or Google Hangouts is more of yeah Google Hangouts and Google meet are the same thing I think is that, am I right there.
22:08 Darin Folb: Yeah it’s true I think they were just changing the name I think they started as hangouts they started to move it to Google meet and when we say we are interoperable with them I mean obviously the platform itself does many things but we are interoperable with the video side of it so but yes basically Google Hangouts, Google meet is the same thing
22:27 Robert Davidovits: Perfect one other question for you guys for, customers that have existing Cisco and Polycom room systems, can you talk a little bit about what it takes to deploy the OneTouch to dial so that there’s ease of use factor as it relates to in-room systems.
22:44 Ken Short: Yes go ahead, Darin.
22:46 Darin Folb: All right so basically we do require and some kind of on-prem, installation, they are basically the minimum of two small virtual machines and the main reason for that is for security also built for security because what that does is it will actually go to your exchange calendar, scrape the information with the invite when that room is invited and then push that information to the endpoint so, that’s self-contained so nobody else sees it but you guys so some of these other companies will offer that within the cloud but then they have to have access to your exchange environment and a lot of customers don’t like that so, so at the very minimum you need to deploy basically two small VMs to start with a one-touch join.
23:29 Robert Davidovits: And just to follow up to that in terms of the hardware what does it require on the customer side in terms of their existing room systems if they’re Polycom or cisco showed up with the existing Polycom or cisco touch control that’s really all they need correct.
23:42 Darin Folb: Yeah they just, I mean basically gets pushed to the endpoint itself so whatever if they’re using some kind of you know pad touchpad or something that’s attached to it’ll just, should just pull from that unit, it just needs it basically needs API access to that and it pushes the information to the Cisco or Polycom device.
24:00 Ken Short: Hey Robert here’s something interesting too, our Oslo facility is our corporate headquarters and about a mile away is Cisco’s video headquarters, so basically all of the guys that used to work at Tandberg are now working either at Cisco video or at Pexip video so we work hand in hand with Cisco, we actually worked very closely with them to come out with the first version that we came out with for our OneTouch join which is embedded in the OneTouch or the touch 10 pad that Cisco provides for all of the road kits so, we work closely with all of the endpoint manufacturers out there and they’d like us to work closely with them because it helps them continue selling their products and it makes it easier for them to use our OneTouch join.
25:08 Rahsaan Wood: Ken this is, Rahsaan again could we, ask a question so for the virtual meeting room can you just kind of maybe, just kind of go over some of the additional features so say I’m a customer I have a Microsoft team set up and I wanted to implement the Pexip solution for the interoperability how would that look and what are some of the features,
25:35 Ken Short: Go ahead, Darin.
25:37 Darin Folb: So there’s basically two things there, so when you say virtual meeting room again it depends on who’s hosting it but the fact that you mentioned teams we would all assume that teams is the virtual meeting room, so in that case we would basically just provide the ability to get a standards-based Cisco Polycom type endpoint, into that meeting and what that involves basically, is actually very easy within the service it’s pretty easy there’s a couple DNS changes, there’s basically you would add a string to the invite so your workflow it remains the same you scheduled meeting like you would schedule a normal Microsoft teams meeting it simply adds that sip URI, and and then devices can get in through our gateway if you added one touch join all OneTouch join does is look for that sip URI, pulls that pushes it to the end point and again connects, so in the case of teams, the end user experience is determined by Microsoft teams, again we simply determine the gate way to get into that environment but we also we also offer own as you were alluding to we also offer our own virtual meeting rooms with our own capability so like you see today you know we’re in a the software as a service type and then you also have it self hosted which have their own set of features as well, so you know, I guess we don’t want to get too in-depth but if you wanted to look into those different platforms you know we would be happy to give you a list of the different features.
27:04 Rahsaan Wood: Sorry so yeah I’m sorry, you’re absolutely right Darin, so I guess what I was really trying to get to is you know so one of the things one of the features that we’re using today, this morning is the ability to host a webinar so I was more or less just kind of talking to some of those additional features that come with the actual Pexip meeting room so sorry I might have the worries is there, just a little bit.
27:27 Ken Shorts: you also have the capability if you’re going to run a meeting or a scheduled meeting to have up to a hundred participants in that meeting and each and every one of you are able to share documentation whoever hosts the meeting has the capability like today Manoja is hosting the meeting, so she if she doesn’t like what I’m saying right now she can mute me and she can go ahead and go right into the meeting herself and orchestrate whatever she wants to do but the host has all of the administrative rights so if they want to lock the meeting after five minutes they can lock the meeting after five minutes, if she wants to record like she did, she’s doing today she just goes to the recording and scheduled portion on our VMR product itself and that allows her to record and then look at the recording and if you’ve got a good software you can, in other words you can edit and do whatever you want with that recording, but you know for the most part it’s just a high quality video conference, that allows you to come into any type of a platform that’s out there today and it gives you that connectivity that’s what we’re all about.
28:54 Darin Folb: Yeah and again if you wanted a higher degree of customization or control like branding like you see the Pexip logo and things like that, that’s all offered in our self-hosted platform as well so we could again deploy it and then it can be customized again by the customer.
29:09 Pat Collins: I just want to say thank you on behalf of MEEC we thank you for doing this presentation and look forward to a couple more from you so thank you very much.
29:19 Rahsaan Wood: Okay could you go ahead and just pull up the slides real quick, just so we get our definitely put our contact information back up there, awesome so once again this is our direct contact information feel free to reach out to any one of us one of the things that we’re offering for all of our members and customers right now we’re offering a 30 day free trial of the service that way you guys can get your hands on and get a feel for it and as well if you do decide to opt to try out the 30-day trial we can set up a time where we can do an in-depth demonstration of the service so you guys can so all the members can see how it works and some of the ins and outs, so like I said this is our contact information Rahsaan would be a sales rep specialist, Manoja, Ken, Darin feel free to contact any of us to set up that free trial, and thank you all so much for joining us once again and feel free to contact us meec@vsgi.com. We appreciate your time.
30:20 Pat Collins: Thank you
30:22 Manoja Wilmalkantha: Thank you.
30:23 Ken Short: Thanks everyone.
30:24 Rahsaan Wood: Thank you everybody.
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