Librestream teams with Red River College

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This article was published 07/12/2017 (2920 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Last month, Librestream Technologies won the mobile business best practices award presented at the St. Gallen Mobile Business Forum in Switzerland.

In October, it took the top award for most effective technology deployment to increase service levels at an international event in Florida organized by an outfit called Field Service.

The company’s highly secure collaborative video technology — called Onsight Collaboration Mobile Platform — has become the go-to tool for some of the largest organizations in the world like Boeing, Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney.

The privately owned Winnipeg company, which started about 13 years ago, is selective about disclosing its financial performance or who its customers are, but is not shy to say that it really wants to find some local customers.

Last year, it closed an $11-million round of venture capital financings — one of the largest in recent years for a Winnipeg company — and yet it still remains classified as one of Winnipeg’s best-kept secrets.

“It’s time to come home and focus a bit more on our home country and province,” said Marieke Wijtkamp, the company’s vice-president of marketing and client services.

As part of those efforts, Librestream has teamed with Red River College to make a number of free trial licences available for its Onsight Collaboration Mobile Platform, especially for users of RRC’s soon-to-be-open MotiveLab, a highly specialized chamber for conducting all sorts of extreme weather testing for heavy-duty equipment.

Representatives from a number of different industries were on hand for a live demonstration of Librestream’s technology on Wednesday.

A technician was in the MotiveLab interacting with video in real time with “experts” in a RRC boardroom and another individual in his office in Toronto.

Among other things, the technology is designed to function in remote locations and can operate with extremely low bandwidth while remaining entirely secure so that images of proprietary technology cannot be circulated on social media, for instance.

Jose Delos Reyes, the research manager for RRC’s Research Partnership & Innovation program, which is building the MotiveLab, said the connection with Librestream will encourage even more organizations to use the MotiveLab.

“If they are based somewhere else, they don’t need to come here,” he said.

“They could use Onsight and see the test in progress while they are sitting in a warm location somewhere else.”

The $10-million MotiveLab is designed to capitalize on the presence of a number of heavy industry manufacturers in the province involved in bus and agricultural equipment manufacturing, for instance.

Officials from companies like MacDon Industries and New Flyer Industries were on hand for the demonstration. Neither of those companies currently use Onsight, but both are considering it.

“It’s not a question of if, but when we start using technology like this,” said Glen Naylor, the senior technical advisor at New Flyer. “We are really trying to figure out where it is the best fit and what will most excite our customers with this kind of technology.”

Wijtkamp said after lots of work in raising awareness about the utility of the technology — in a market space that Librestream effectively invented — she said the company is currently experiencing strong market traction.

“There’s no question revenue is growing dramatically,” she said.

“The market is more ready. There are RFPs (requests for proposals) out there for this type of technology and there didn’t used to be. The market has matured and people now know that this is possible.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca