Best Practices Award Template - StarLeaf

2017 Latin American Video Conferencing Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award

BEST PRACTICES RESEARCH

Contents Background and Company Performance ........................................................................ 3 Industry Challenges .............................................................................................. 3 Entrepreneurial Innovation and Customer Impact ..................................................... 3 Conclusion........................................................................................................... 6 Significance of Entrepreneurial Leadership ..................................................................... 7 Understanding Entrepreneurial Leadership ..................................................................... 7 Key Benchmarking Criteria .................................................................................... 8 Best Practices Award Analysis for StarLeaf .................................................................... 8 Decision Support Scorecard ................................................................................... 8 Entrepreneurial Innovation .................................................................................... 9 Customer Impact ................................................................................................. 9 Decision Support Matrix ...................................................................................... 10 Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices ................................................................................................................. 11 The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards ..................... 12 Research Methodology ........................................................................................ 12 About Frost & Sullivan ........................................................................................ 12

© Frost & Sullivan 2017

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Background and Company Performance Industry Challenges Video conferencing vendors were heavily challenged by adverse economic and political conditions in Latin America during the past 2 years. This led many enterprises and government agencies to postpone investments in communications and become much more price sensitive than before. Consequently, vendors were forced to redesign go-to-market strategies and come up with cost-competitive value propositions to maintain or gain market penetration. Additionally, hosted/cloud communications delivery models are gaining traction. This presents new opportunities and challenges to both vendors and customers of video conferencing solutions. The popularity of hosted/cloud communications solutions has resulted in growing customer preference for operational expenditures (OPEX) models (whether hosted or on-premises), and this has curbed capital expenditure (CAPEX) investment opportunities and purchases of new software or upgrades. Customers also increasingly expect more communications capabilities for a lower cost, forcing many video conferencing vendors to constantly innovate while offering their solutions at more compelling prices. Today, many businesses are looking for less hardware, more collaboration features, flexible third-party integration, and the ability to move to the cloud for a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). This, coupled with continuous price erosion due to new technological advancements and competitive pressures, is limiting overall revenue opportunities for traditional video conferencing vendors. During the past few years, another key challenge that video conferencing vendors have encountered includes issues of interoperability among different vendors’ systems. In other words, it has been challenging to have a video conferencing system in place that is able to maintain high quality standards if the customers use endpoints or systems manufactured by different vendors. This situation has restrained the further use of video conferencing among different enterprises and has become a long-term customer desire. It is the vendor’s responsibility to work harder to build interoperability among its systems, which promises to significantly increase the number of video conferencing users worldwide.

Entrepreneurial Innovation and Customer Impact Founded in 2008, StarLeaf is a privately held company with offices throughout the world. The company is a service provider and manufacturer of both infrastructures as a service, including video conferencing services and a comprehensive range of video endpoints for meeting rooms, desktops, and mobility.


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Entrepreneurial Innovation StarLeaf provides a complete suite of video calling and conferencing solutions that address the needs of Fortune 500 enterprises as well as small and medium business (SMB). The company aims to get people communicating with as little stress as possible by providing services that remove the complication of the user having to manage and maintain the video solutions. Furthermore, StarLeaf allows customers to leverage their existing video endpoints while using the company´s services. Or, if the customer decides to renew its terminals, StarLeaf allows customers to acquire new cost-effective and state-of-the-art endpoints ranging from robust rooms solutions to small huddle rooms systems. By doing this, StarLeaf adapts to the specific needs of each customer according to their particular situation, creating tailored solutions for every single case. Although StarLeaf has only been providing solutions to Latin American customers since 2015, the company has already won many important logos in the region both with SMBs and large enterprises. These companies are in several industry verticals, such as food chains, sports and entertainment, non-profit organizations, manufacturing industry, professional services, and retail and consumer goods. StarLeaf based its regional headquarters in São Paulo, Brazil, where it is soon to establish its first point of presence (PoP) in a data center in the region in order to bring the network closer to regional customers. However, its footprint reaches several countries in the region through channel partners, such as Colombia, Chile, and Mexico. One of the greatest implementations StarLeaf deployed in Brazil is Habib´s, the world’s largest Middle Eastern restaurant chain. It has approximately 500 restaurants in the country. Habib’s challenges occurred because it is a highly distributed business and it needed to improve its remote communications by adding a video interface. To solve this, the company equipped many meeting rooms in all of its offices with StarLeaf room solution GT Minis. It then widely distributed StarLeaf´s software client, Breeze, which allows employees and customers to participate in video calls and meetings from anywhere and from any device. As a result, Habib´s was able to streamline best-in-class internal and external video communications across the organization without having to hire experts to manage the solution. Competitive Differentiation StarLeaf developed and operates its own platform, which allows the company to rapidly respond to and continually evolve its service to meet the demands of users. This constitutes a strong competitive advantage that can be used against service providers that depend on external networks and therefore cannot control the entirety of service quality. StarLeaf developed and manages its purpose-built architecture, called OpenCloud, which allows the company to provide secure, reliable, and feature-rich voice and video collaboration services. StarLeaf OpenCloud is deployed in data centers around the globe and is fully redundant and duplicated at each PoP, which allows the service to work


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uninterruptedly. In addition, all systems are backed up daily, thereby ensuring all customer configurations are protected and kept up to date. Market Gaps One of the major challenges in the video conferencing world is interoperability. Many platforms are not compatible with each other and customers that want to acquire new platforms or endpoints are forced to replace their entire investment or keep buying from the same vendor. Furthermore, users of one video conferencing system are often not able to communicate or fully leverage communications with users employing a different system. Unlike other solutions, StarLeaf delivers seamless interoperability across all platforms to enable direct calling, bi-directional content sharing, and multi-party conferencing and recording. This means that users do not have to rely on bridges to meet, they can simply dial any other users in the same way they would use a phone. Blue Ocean Strategy Specifically, StarLeaf offers robust support for Microsoft´s Skype for Business (SfB) environment, which allows its customers to seamlessly communicate with SfB users. The company enables any third-party video meeting room system—such as Cisco, Polycom, or Lifesize—to join a scheduled Skype Meeting, preserving the workflow of the SfB client user. This provides great value to StarLeaf´s customers because SfB has been adopted by many organizations in Latin America. Moreover, the basic connectivity services with SfB are free of charge for StarLeaf´s customers (called Medley services), which have significantly enhanced its value proposition from a price-performance standpoint. Price/Performance Value StarLeaf´s licensing model is based on concurrent usage—the customer pays according to the time its employees spent on conferences. This has proven to be substantially more cost effective for many organizations when compared to the traditional per host/per port subscription model. Additionally, for businesses that want to swap out endpoints, StarLeaf offers a trade-in program that provides its GT Mini video endpoint to the customer at no cost. Because also StarLeaf provides services on a monthly subscription modality, the customers can avoid big upfront investments in the video conferencing infrastructure while eliminating the high costs to manage and maintain aging on-premise infrastructure. Finally, because of the advanced communication protocols, StarLeaf OpenCloud has a much lower bandwidth requirement than the industry´s average. This eliminates the need for extremely strong connections that are often particularly expensive, especially in Latin American countries.


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Customer Purchasing Experience Although StarLeaf sells through channel partners and does not compete with them , the company usually includes one of its own executives in most sales discussions to assure that the customer´s communication needs and business objectives are fully understood . This is so the solution offered to the customer is fully customized. Far from a transactional sale, the conversation takes on a consultative tone in which StarLeaf and its channel partner take the time and effort to comprehend the customer´s pain points, how it can enhance productivity and business agility, and how StarLeaf can leverage any pre-existing investment while adding significant value. Moreover, every partner that sells StarLeaf is required to have all of its services running internally, so as to be able to fully understand and demonstrate the company value proposition. Finally, when a prospect takes a defined interest in StarLeaf, the company puts a system in place for it to test the services first and then make a decision. The result is always the same: a prospect that tries the StarLeaf value proposition becomes a customer.

Conclusion StarLeaf is disrupting the video conferencing market in Latin America, bringing a renewed value proposition based on extreme flexibility, tailored solutions, and customer value. The company is growing in several industry verticals, countries, and in both the SMB and larger enterprise segments. StarLeaf’s state-of-the-art technology, licensing model, and price/performance value are bringing video conferencing service to a whole new level. With its strong overall performance, StarLeaf has earned Frost & Sullivan’s 2017 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year Award.


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Significance of Entrepreneurial Leadership Ultimately, growth in any organization depends upon customers purchasing from a company and then making the decision to return time and again. In a sense, then, everything is truly about the customer—and making those customers happy is the cornerstone of any long-term successful innovation or growth strategy. To achieve these dual goals (customer engagement and growth), an organization must be best-in-class in three key areas: understanding demand, nurturing the brand, and differentiating from the competition.

Understanding Entrepreneurial Leadership Demand forecasting, branding, and differentiation underpin an entrepreneurial company’s journey toward forming deep relationships with customers and permanently altering the market with their actions. These two concepts—Entrepreneurial Innovation and Customer Impact—are the cornerstones of this Award, as discussed further in the next section.


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Key Benchmarking Criteria For the Entrepreneurial

Company of the Year

Award, Frost

& Sullivan analysts

independently evaluated two key factors—Entrepreneurial Innovation and Customer Impact—according to the criteria identified below. Entrepreneurial Innovation Criterion 1: Market Disruption Criterion 2: Competitive Differentiation Criterion 3: Market Gaps Criterion 4: Blue Ocean Strategy Criterion 5: Passionate Persistence Customer Impact Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience Criterion 5: Brand Equity

Best Practices Award Analysis for StarLeaf Decision Support Scorecard To support its evaluation of best practices across multiple business performance categories, Frost & Sullivan employs a customized Decision Support Scorecard. This tool allows our research and consulting teams to objectively analyze performance, according to the key benchmarking criteria listed in the previous section, and to assign ratings on that basis. The tool follows a 10-point scale that allows for nuances in performance evaluation. Ratings guidelines are illustrated below. RATINGS GUIDELINES

The Decision Support Scorecard is organized by Entrepreneurial Innovation and Customer Impact (i.e., These are the overarching categories for all 10 benchmarking criteria; the definitions for each criterion are provided beneath the scorecard.). The research team confirms the veracity of this weighted scorecard through sensitivity analysis, which confirms that small changes to the ratings for a specific criterion do not lead to a significant change in the overall relative rankings of the companies.


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The results of this analysis are shown below. To remain unbiased and to protect the interests of all organizations reviewed, we have chosen to refer to the other key participants as Competitor 2 and Competitor 3. Measurement of 1–10 (1 = poor; 10 = excellent)

Entrepreneurial Company of the Year

Entrepreneurial Innovation

StarLeaf

Customer Impact

Average Rating

10

9

9.5

Competitor 2

9

9

9.0

Competitor 3

7

8

7.5

Entrepreneurial Innovation Criterion 1: Market Disruption Requirement: Innovative solutions that have genuine potential to disrupt the market, obsoleting current solutions and shaking up competition Criterion 2: Competitive Differentiation Requirement: Deep understanding of both current and emerging competition to create and communicate strong competitive differentiators in the market Criterion 3: Market Gaps Requirement: A clear understanding of customers’ desired outcomes, the products that currently help them achieve those outcomes, and where key gaps may exist Criterion 4: Blue Ocean Strategy Requirement:

Strategic

focus

on

creating

a

leadership

position

in

a

potentially

“uncontested” market space, manifested by stiff barriers to entry for competitors Criterion 5: Passionate Persistence Requirement: A deep belief in the “rightness” of an idea and a commitment to pursuing it despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles

Customer Impact Criterion 1: Price/Performance Value Requirement: Products or services offer the best value for the price, compared to similar offerings in the market. Criterion 2: Customer Purchase Experience Requirement: Customers feel they are buying the most optimal solution that addresses both their unique needs and their unique constraints. Criterion 3: Customer Ownership Experience Requirement: Customers are proud to own the company’s product or service and have a positive experience throughout the life of the product or service. Criterion 4: Customer Service Experience


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Requirement: Customer service is accessible, fast, stress-free, and of high quality. Criterion 5: Brand Equity Requirement: Customers have a positive view of the brand and exhibit high brand loyalty.

Decision Support Matrix Once all companies have been evaluated according to the Decision Support Scorecard, analysts then position the candidates on the matrix shown below, enabling them to visualize which companies are truly breakthrough and which ones are not yet operating at best-in-class levels. High

StarLeaf

Customer Impact

Competitor 2

Competitor 3

Low Low


Entrepreneurial Innovation

10

High



Best Practices Recognition: 10 Steps to Researching, Identifying, and Recognizing Best Practices Frost & Sullivan analysts follow a 10-step process to evaluate Award candidates and assess their fit with select best practice criteria. The reputation and integrity of the Awards are based on close adherence to this process. STEP

OBJECTIVE

KEY ACTIVITIES

OUTPUT

Identify Award recipient candidates from around the globe

 Conduct in-depth industry research  Identify emerging sectors  Scan multiple geographies

Pipeline of candidates who potentially meet all bestpractice criteria

Perform comprehensive, 360-degree research on all candidates in the pipeline

 Interview thought leaders and industry practitioners  Assess candidates’ fit with best-practice criteria  Rank all candidates

Matrix positioning of all candidates’ performance relative to one another

1

Monitor, target, and screen

2

Perform 360-degree research

3

Invite thought leadership in best practices

Perform in-depth examination of all candidates

 Confirm best-practice criteria  Examine eligibility of all candidates  Identify any information gaps

Detailed profiles of all ranked candidates

4

Initiate research director review

Conduct an unbiased evaluation of all candidate profiles

 Brainstorm ranking options  Invite multiple perspectives on candidates’ performance  Update candidate profiles

Final prioritization of all eligible candidates and companion best-practice positioning paper

5

Assemble panel of industry experts

Present findings to an expert panel of industry thought leaders

 Share findings  Strengthen cases for candidate eligibility  Prioritize candidates

Refined list of prioritized Award candidates

6

Conduct global industry review

Build consensus on Award candidates’ eligibility

 Hold global team meeting to review all candidates  Pressure-test fit with criteria  Confirm inclusion of all eligible candidates

Final list of eligible Award candidates, representing success stories worldwide

7

Perform quality check

Develop official Award consideration materials

 Perform final performance benchmarking activities  Write nominations  Perform quality review

High-quality, accurate, and creative presentation of nominees’ successes

8

Reconnect with panel of industry experts

Finalize the selection of the best-practice Award recipient

 Review analysis with panel  Build consensus  Select recipient

Decision on which company performs best against all best-practice criteria

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Communicate recognition

Inform Award recipient of Award recognition

 Present Award to the CEO  Inspire the organization for continued success  Celebrate the recipient’s performance

Announcement of Award and plan for how recipient can use the Award to enhance the brand

Upon licensing, company is able to share Award news with stakeholders and customers

 Coordinate media outreach  Design a marketing plan  Assess Award’s role in future strategic planning

Widespread awareness of recipient’s Award status among investors, media personnel, and employees

Take

10 strategic action


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The Intersection between 360-Degree Research and Best Practices Awards Research Methodology Frost & Sullivan’s 360-degree research methodology

represents

the

analytical

360-DEGREE RESEARCH: SEEING ORDER IN THE CHAOS

rigor of our research process. It offers a 360-degree-view of industry challenges, trends, and issues by integrating all 7 of Frost & Sullivan's research methodologies. Too

often

growth

companies

decisions

understanding

of

make

based

on

their

important a

narrow

environment,

leading to errors of both omission and commission. Successful growth strategies are founded on a thorough understanding of market, technical, economic, financial, customer, best practices, and demographic analyses. The integration of these research disciplines into the 360-degree research methodology platform

provides

for

an

evaluation

benchmarking

industry

participants and for identifying those performing at best-in-class levels.

About Frost & Sullivan Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, enables clients to accelerate growth and achieve best-in-class positions in growth, innovation and leadership. The company's Growth Partnership Service provides the CEO and the CEO's Growth Team with disciplined research and best practice models to drive the generation, evaluation and implementation of powerful growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan leverages more than 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from 45 offices on six continents. To join our Growth Partnership, please visit http://www.frost.com.


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