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Vidyo is looking to separate itself in an increasingly competitive video conferencing space by offering its technology as a hosted service.
The company has provided software-based video communications to customers for several years, but this week unveiled Hosted VidyoConferencing, a video conferencing-as-a-service (VCaaS) offering that is housed in Vidyo’s data center and accessed via the cloud.
In addition, Vidyo on March 2 introduced another cloud service aimed at developers. Vidyo Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offers simplified APIs that make it easier for developers to create custom applications with embedded video.
The new solutions are the result of requests from customers who wanted the option for cloud-based or hybrid video conferencing environments, according to Vidyo. However, until now, adopting cloud-based video conferencing technology meant having to accept trade-offs, said Fahim Siddiqui, who in January was named Vidyo’s senior vice president of cloud services.
“To date, organizations had to either rely on very expensive room- based dedicated systems for high end collaboration or had to rely on cloud- based lower quality services,” Siddiqui wrote in a post on the company blog. “The cloud based collaboration services also fail to optimize bandwidth and connectivity between enterprise campus sites and the Internet. Vidyo is changing this, delivering high end collaboration via a cloud-based service.”
Vidyo isn’t alone in bringing its technology to the cloud. Established video conferencing vendors like Cisco Systems, Polycom and Lifesize are expanding their cloud portfolios, and others, like Blue Jeans Network and Zoom Video Communications, are using the cloud as a foundation of their offerings.
Such services are getting the attention of businesses, analysts with IDC noted in a quarterly report on the video conferencing equipment market released this week.
“Data indicates that video continues to be a key component of collaboration and places high on the list of priorities for many organizations,” Petr Jirovsky, research manager for IDC’s Worldwide Networking Trackers unit, said in a statement. “Among the challenges customers are currently working through are determining exactly when and how to provision their video deployments, as more software-centric and cloud-based service offerings become part of the enterprise video market landscape.”
Vidyo wants to bring high-quality, cloud-based video collaboration services to businesses, Siddiqui wrote in his blog post.
“Vidyo is now bringing up to 4K resolution video collaboration service to the cloud with support for hybrid architecture which optimizes on-campus and campus to cloud connectivity,” he wrote. “Enterprise customers can now use Vidyo’s cloud- based service to replace standalone video conferencing hardware, Web conferencing solutions and audio conferencing services with a single high quality subscription solution.”
Hosted VidyoConferencing—which is available now—uses the company’s router cascading feature to reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 96 percent and lessen bottlenecking and latency. The highly scalable platform also offers cloud-bursting capabilities to enable customers to grow capacity when usage spikes, can adapt to mobile and fixed networks alike, interoperates with phones running Windows, Linux, iOS, Mac, Android, H.323, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and PSTN phones, and supports WebRTC.
Vidyo PaaS works with an array of endpoints—including mobile devices, desktops systems and the Web—and helps developers accelerate the development and deployment of their apps, according to the company. The cloud-based platform includes pay-as-you-go usage-based pricing, and will be available in the second quarter.