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Highfive: Reimagining Meetings and the Channel

Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Redwood City, California, Highfive is a privately held enterprise specializing in intelligent, in-room video conferencing. The company is on a mission to make video communications ubiquitous. The first stop on the journey is their reimagining of the meeting room experience through video conferencing solutions that are easy to buy and set up, simple to use and support, and exceptional at boosting productivity and collaboration.
Highfive delivers the only integrated hardware and software platform born in the cloud for in-room video conferencing. Setting up a new meeting room takes less than 15 minutes, and the resulting immersive conferencing solution gives teams instant collaboration so they can just get to work without fussing with complex hardware and cumbersome software.
People work differently today, collaborating with more customers, partners, and colleagues across town and across the world. Workers themselves are also untethered to an office, as likely to work from home or a cafe as they are from a hotel or a remote location. While typical solutions are hard to use, expensive to support, yet still offer low-quality experiences, Highfive gives IT and workers the great quality, reliability, and user experience they’ve come to expect from today’s technologies.
An All-in-One Solution 
Highfive brings together an all-in-one, bundled hardware and software solution available for one low, per- room price. It features Dolby Voice® to deliver high-fidelity, crystal-clear audio and offers 4K HDR video cameras for stunning video quality. It was born in the cloud using modern technologies like Web Real-Time Communications (WebRTC), AWS hyperscale cloud computing and storage, and a cloudnative operating system combined to deliver a better experience at a lower cost. Highfive also integrates with existing Slack, G Suite, Office365, and other external apps.
This combination of approaches and modern technologies eliminates nearly all of the IT burden, enables nontechnical workers to perform the installations in minutes, and leaves the updates, maintenance, and security to Highfive, which does it all automatically. And because it runs on AWS hyperscale cloud, Highfive supports nearly limitless scale, allowing organizations to equip hundreds of meeting rooms and giving video collaboration to thousands of workers in an instant. Because it’s built on WebRTC, Highfive leverages the ubiquity of web browsers to eliminate end-user downloads, the friction of expensive and time-consuming manual software installations, and the accompanying troubleshooting and support requirements on IT.
Highfive lets anyone start meetings on time, everytime, without compatibility, complexity, or quality issues that can derail otherwise productive teams.
Video for Everyone, from IT to Workers, Enterprises to SMBs 
According to Highfive, what IT demands is a video conferencing solution that’s easy to deploy and maintain, easy to support, and easy to buy with transparent pricing. New meeting rooms must be outfitted easily and quickly. It must require less software on workers’ laptops, more compatibility with existing tools and workflows, and minimal training to drive adoption. It must offer centralized monitoring and maintenance, scalability to support growing (or contracting) teams, and a service-attached model to eliminate expensive capital expenditures. In other words, it should work just like people expect it to work.
Highfive fulfills these requirements by ignoring the legacy model of tangled, complex, hard-to-use, incompatible conferencing systems. Using WebRTC and AWS hyperscale cloud, along with crisp, clear Dolby Voice® audio and crystal clear 4K HDR video, Highfive has created meeting room collaboration solutions that provide the joyful experience workers want with the simple and cost-effective delivery model IT craves.
Highfive has redefined Hardware-as-a- Service (HaaS), which takes the hardware, software, and services that were previously purchased separately, or cobbled together, in an ad hoc package, and bundles them into an allin- one solution. Highfive provides everything—the software, hardware, service, support, maintenance, and more—for one price, in a fullymaintained and always-on solution. The benefits are many, since buyers have more transparency on what the get and how much it costs, IT spends less effort on deployment, maintenance, and support, and users get a simple solution that works seamlessly and effortlessly.
Delivering Future-proof Productivity 
Highfive is also reimagining how companies buy, deploy, and use video conferencing solutions, and will continue to do so. Highfive was first to market bundling hardware and software into one sleek package that’s delivered as a service. It pioneered the combination of hyperscale cloud, WebRTC, and the simplicity of the bundle to put video collaboration in every intelligent meeting room, all with care-free maintenance. It makes intelligent meeting rooms easier to procure, setup, use, and maintain, whether it’s in one small huddle room or across an entire company. And through the company’s unique HaaS delivery model, anytime there’s a new feature or technology improvement, every customer gets it.
With Highfive, any business can quickly give workers a modern, digital workplace where every meeting room is equipped for flawless, immersive collaboration that provides a “like you’re there” experience.
Channel-first, Channel-friendly 
Highfive has installed a new two-tiered distribution go-to-market model to partner with the industry’s leading distributors and resellers. Highfive’s channel program is led by Vice President Greg Popham, former U.S. director of small and medium business sales at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
Highfive is channel-first, channel friendly,”commented Popham, who took over in January. “We set out to make our program simple and intuitive for partners. That includes making processes, pricing, and deal registration fast & simple. Plus, there are new medallion levels and other opportunities for partners to earn incremental, front-end margin as well as back-end benefits. Our program is more rewarding for partners, providing them with greater opportunities to drive revenue and grow with us.”
Popham adds that partners earn full margin/compensation for contract renewals (on the whole solution) so partners get ongoing revenue streams instead of a one-time payment. It’s clear that Highfive has not just re imagined the meeting room experience, but also a new channel friendly motion to make reselling and provisioning Highfive as simple as using the product itself.