by Jim Lundy
Highfive recently announced the addition of the new huddle room offering from Dolby—Dolby Voice Rooms—which now supports both voice and video.
The huddle room inclusion will help Highfive compete more aggressively in the midsize enterprise market. This announcement is part of a series of product rollouts that will take place now and next week as part of the annual Enterprise Connect Tradeshow.
Dolby Voice Room: Intelligence and a 4K Camera
Dolby Voice Room has two components: the HD speakerphone for the conference room table, and a new 4K camera that features HDR video mapping. This 4K camera enables facial recognition even in low lighting. Aragon sees intelligent room offerings as more complete than a basic huddle solution. Voice can be actively managed, a feature which Dolby, Polycom, and others offer. Dolby’s smart addition of video conferencing now makes it a complete offering.
Dolby mainly distributes its offerings via a handful of partners that includes BlueJeans and Highfive. Given the success of the Logitech huddle solution, we would expect this offering to be pushed more aggressively.
Highfive: A Growing Product Portfolio
For Highfive, adding Dolby Voice Room comes at a time when demand for huddle solutions is at an all-time high. Highfive just raised more funding and it now has a video conferencing offering to compete with Zoom and others. Powered by Dolby, Highfive now has a portfolio of intelligent video room offerings,
We also note that most of Highfive’s video conferencing solutions have their own native video hardware. The Dolby Voice Room with voice and video is offered as part of Highfive’s premium room plan. We think there is a lot of room for Highfive in the market now that there is an execution play, awareness, and direct and indirect distribution.
Voice Quality and Sound Management: Dolby vs. Polycom
When it comes to voice, Polycom has had significant investments relative to automatic voice quality and sound management. Polycom is also one of the vendors who has upped the game for high-end offerings for huddle rooms. Their Trio 8000 Series offers some of the best voice quality and sound management on the market.
People-Centric Collaboration and UCC
Intelligent video room offerings have been on the market for about a year, and are part of the march to what Aragon calls people-centric collaboration. Automatic scheduling and seamless modality switching without human intervention is the direction in which the UCC market needs to go.
Stay tuned for more analysis as announcements from Enterprise Connect roll out.