Systems Integration Asia – April-May 2018

ClearOne: Clearly One!

Serving ProAV with Solutions Seamless

Small is big, they say! They also said 'great things come in small

packages!' Perhaps, one of the best interpretaons for these

expressions in ProAV relevance is talking about ClearOne- the

audio-visual conferencing and collaboraon soluons developer.

Humbly stang itself as a small company, with not so much of

market buzzing budgets, the technology-focused enterprise from

Salt Lake, Utah, is clearly staking its claim to be 'One' with nerve

and verve. Steering its iniaves from front is its President, CEO &

Chairperson of Board Zee Hakimoglu.

Interacng with Ram Bhavanashi on the show floor of ISE 2018,

Zee expounds her vision for an apparently, clearly one industry

posion. Read on:

SI Asia: It appears, there is a new found dynamism from ClearOne
in terms of product innovaon and market approach...

ZEE: I don't necessarily think it is a new dynamism; ClearOne does a
lot of work in the background. We made significant investments and
technology strides, basically 2009 thru 2014-15 very fruiul years.
They were fundamental investments in video technology, and not
outright products ready for the market; they were technology
acquisions done with a view to developing innovave products for
ensuing markets. So, we put in a lot of money, me and effort to
acquire technology and team competence, at the front end to build
and sustain the development of innovave products. When the
products are finally ready for roll out, we then create excitement in
the market about the arrival of these innovave products.

SI Asia: How would you characterize this journey of innovaon?
What breakthroughs?

ZEE: We made tremendous breakthroughs on the audio side to begin
with. We came out with the world's first beam-forming microphone
product. That wasn't an easy task; we understood the market need,
took a chance, spent a lot of money on R&D, and came out with an
extraordinarily innovave product that the market absolutely
appreciated. We didn't want to celebrate with just that. We have
always wanted to develop a total soluon of the audio processing
chain. Your readers may not know or remember, ClearOne was the
first company to invent the first distributed echo cancelling mixer for
conferencing. We introduced addional audio innovaon- we
acquired a company called Sabine, who was the second in the
market to introduce professional wireless conferencing microphone
systems. When we acquired this wireless technology, we needed to
do further development to raise the products to the standards that
ClearOne stood for. And before that, we launched our own line of
ceiling mic arrays to complement our DSP mixers including the most
recent, the Ceiling Mic -X introduced last month. No other mixer

manufacturer offers such a broad microphone porolio

complementary to DSPs as ClearOne.

We recently introduced Converge Pro-2 (Cp2)- a completely new

DSP plaorm, a fourth generaon mixer plaorm which offers the

world's best audio signal processing for professional audio. It stands

up against any audio processor on the market today. Also, at ISE, we

announced a nave Skype for business soware upgrade for

enterprises that want the ulmate in audio and their familiar Skype

interface for their Skype sessions.

A lile back in me, even as we were making our strides in audio,

we thought why not add video soluons as well. Here again we

acquired companies with core differenated technologies having

advanced soware-based video but their products were not mature.

One company focussed on collaboraon soware-based room-

based soluons and the other focussed on cloud collaboraon

soluons. We correctly projected where the video market was

heading and successfully intercepted it. We also invested in video in

terms of streaming Video over IP, and came out with one of the

most powerful, flexible, and scalable systems for AV over IP which is

called VIEW®. These video and audio has innovaons have spawned

over a 100 patents, and patent-pending innovaons.

With all these acquisions and technology investments, we work

hard to balance our other needed investments, such as markeng.

As a public company as opposed to one that is VC funded, we build

value thru core assets such as technology, products, and channels

rather than heavy markeng. We recently introduced the ClearOne

Connecon touring trailer- a 36-foot touring trailer, with all

ClearOne soluons working live criss-crossing the United States

stopping at end-users and partner locaons. The touring trailer

gives us the opportunity to visit with consultants, integrators, end

users for them to conveniently see and experience the ClearOne

advantage. It has generated tremendous excitement since we

launched it early this year.

INTERVIEW