Case Study: Product Management

Company: Vibe Solutions Group - Industry leader in video communications solutions targeting broadband industry

Situation: GlobalStreams was a B2B hardware company that delivering broadband video editing and streaming products to the broadcast and entertainment industries. GlobalStreams’ target market was saturated with similar solutions and the growth rate of the sector was flat. Although GlobalStreams had patented technology, it was not clear that further investment in the product line to the same market segments would yield an acceptable return on investment.

Solution: A market and product analysis was conducted to identify where GlobalStreams’ core patented technologies could be applied to other marketing segments. The analysis consisted of:

• Market sizing for video communication technology, addressing both business and consumer, using available secondary research
• Competitive analysis to identify solution providers in the market, their competitive differentiation and feature sents
• Trend and market analysis based on research results and interviews with industry analysts
• An in-depth technical assessment of GlobalStreams technology

The analysis found that there existed an “opportunity gap” in the market for an easy to use, consumer video communications platform targeted at the growing segment of mainstream broadband users. While there were consumer video communications applications in the market, many of them free, many of them were geared toward early adopters and didn’t deliver the combination of quality and ease of use consumers were looking for. The market analysis also discovered that the “broadband wars” between cable operators and DSL providers had created a need for cable operators to continually offer more compelling consumer applications to maintain price and retain customers.

The recommendation was to take GlobalStreams core technology and knowledge of video compression to deliver an entirely new solution to a new market: A consumer video communications platform that allowed cable operators to deliver broadband-centric video solutions to their customers. An entire business and product development plan was created to address this new opportunity. Subsequently, a new company was formed, Vibe Solutions Group, which has deployed its video communications platform to more than 70% of the cable operators, representing more than 15 million customers. Vibe has since acquired its own funding and is on a profitable course to expand its product line and client base.

Application:

• Leadership in reassessing company direction
• Ability to integrate market opportunity with company’s core value
• Proven ability to drive strategic planning process for opportunity assessment to a go-to-market plan