Vidyo officials in the fall will roll out a video platform-as-a-service that they say will give developers the tools and services they need to more easily embed enterprise-grade video conferencing capabilities into their applications, business processes and smart, connected devices.
The company currently has Vidyo.io in alpha, and is beginning to open it up to beta testers. The general availability of the technology will come later in the fall, according to company officials.
The announcement of Vidyo.io coincides with the release of a report by IDC analysts on the emerging video platform-as-a-service (video PaaS) market, which they see growing in the United States from $44 million this year to $1.7 billion in 2020.
The company—as well as most others in the rapidly changing video conferencing space—already offers APIs and a software-development kit (SDK) to help other vendors connect with third-party applications to have those applications integrated with their products. Video PaaS takes that another step by building up the platform around the APIs, from developer tools (such as sandboxes, dashboards and sample code), customer and partner use cases, scalability and service-level agreement (SLA) capabilities, support and developer evangelism, according to IDC analysts.
Vidyo’s APIs and SDK touch on a broad range of verticals, including health care for such tasks as electronic health record (EHR) projects and telemedicine. In addition, Vidyo also is seeing adoption in video banking for greater customer engagement and field services, where the company’s technologies are being used to video-enable smart glasses.
Among the customers that have used the APIs and SDK to create Vidyo-enabled applications are Alibaba, which used it for its messaging platform, Xiaomo for video-enabling its smartphones, NCR for bringing video to its ATM machines and ServiceNow for its IT help desks.
“Ten years ago Vidyo unleashed video conferencing from the room,” Vidyo CEO Eran Westman wrote in a post on the company blog. “Since then hundreds of enterprise companies and service providers have used Vidyo’s SDK and APIs to video-enable applications, drones, phones, smart glasses, robots, kiosks and other new form factors. More than 50 million patients around the world can access our video-enabled telehealth offerings.”
The video conferencing market is changing as businesses look for software- and cloud-based alternatives to expensive room systems. The trends toward greater workforce mobility, the cloud and bring-your-own-device (BYOD), as well as the rapid proliferation of mobile devices, are increasing the demand for solutions that can enable people to collaborate at anytime, anywhere and on any device they want.