Fuze Leading Consumerization of Video Collaboration for Work with Global Freemium Growth and Enterprise-Wide Adoption

SAN FRANCISCO, April 2, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Building on accelerating adoption of its freemium video communication and collaboration service, FuzeBox today announced several significant developments that further its mission to make video collaboration a utility available to all knowledge workers across devices, desktops and meeting rooms. Under a bold new Fuze brand, the company introduced a new user experience designed to drive much higher adoption and user engagement than traditional video conferencing tools.

Fuze also announced a strategic agreement with BT to bolster its global scale and accelerate availability of a full-featured Fuze freemium service worldwide. Since launching a freemium service in the U.S. just six months ago, Fuze monthly signup rates have nearly tripled with new users representing 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies.

"Use of video communications in our personal lives is growing rapidly through user-friendly, low-friction applications, yet workplace tools are not meeting user expectations in terms of experience or multi-platform support. As a result, people are bringing consumer-grade tools to work," said David Obrand, CEO of Fuze. "Fuze is leading the consumerization of enterprise video communications with applications users love that also have security and controls IT requires. This is resulting in adoption and user engagement rates unmatched by current tools and driving leading organizations to deliver Fuze as a utility for all of their knowledge workers."

"Video communication is integral to the way we work at Groupon and Fuze has helped us think very differently about this type of technology," said Tim Sheff, manager global multimedia technologies, Groupon. "After using Fuze for more than a year, we are deploying it across the organization to more than 11,000 employees in 48 countries. We've found Fuze is attractive for uses across a broad range of roles. We've seen strong adoption and are able to measure user engagement and understand the return we are getting using analytics in the Fuze platform."

Fuze is designed for the way people work today, across devices and connecting with the tools they already use. Fuze combines HD voice and video communication and content collaboration, allowing remote workers and virtual teams to stay better connected face-to-face, while also sharing and collaborating on dynamic content like images, animated presentations and videos in real time with consistent quality. Through integrations, users can schedule Fuze within Microsoft and Google calendars, click-to-call from enterprise instant messaging applications including Microsoft Lync, and will be able to share content from leading cloud-based file storage platforms.

The Fuze Telepresence Connect service allows customers to easily connect traditional video conferencing and telepresence systems from Cisco, Polycom, LifeSize and others to people using Fuze.

Fuze freemium service driving voluntary adoption and user engagement
The Fuze freemium subscription model allows individuals to self-discover Fuze applications and easily use among their internal and external teams across the leading mobile and desktop platforms at no cost and without complicated IT set up. The ability to measure adoption, user engagement and business value, allows organizations to make informed, confident decisions when investing in video collaboration for their employees.

BT extends Fuze scale and accelerates global freemium service
The Fuze platform is powered by global cloud infrastructure with regional data centers for optimized routing, reliability and quality. Users have flexibility in how they join Fuze meetings, including by phone. To enhance the quality and coverage of dial-in phone capabilities, Fuze signed a multi-year agreement with BT, in which BT will provide global toll and toll-free dial-in and dial-out (Call Me) phone capabilities as part of the Fuze service. In addition, Fuze will leverage BT's high-performance, global network infrastructure to further enhance quality and reliability.

The expanded dial-in phone coverage will accelerate delivery of the Fuze freemium service on a global scale, complete with local dial-in numbers for nearly all countries. This also provides enterprise customers truly global coverage through the IP-based voice and video capabilities of the Fuze platform, complemented by BT toll and toll-free phone services.

"In collaboration, creating a common context is everything! Many tools today require you to go to another tool to get an e-mail, and a different tool to get a document you want to use in the meeting. This requires the user to deal with new contexts in each case, which saps productivity and makes it a much less enjoyable experience. What I like about Fuze is that it has one common context for the meeting, and it is the same across all devices." said David Coleman, senior research analyst, GigaOm Research. "Fuze is building a video-enabled collaboration service that is simple enough for everyone to use on a more frequent, everyday basis."

Availability
The new Fuze for iPad is now available in the app store. New Fuze applications for iPhone, Mac, Windows, Android (phone and tablet), and web browsers (HTML5) are planned for availability over the next quarter (existing applications now available for these platforms).

About Fuze
Fuze is redefining video communication and collaboration in the workplace. Experience it for yourself at www.fuze.com.

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SOURCE Fuze