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Pexip, a video conferencing startup whose founding team comes from Cisco Systems and Tandberg, is rolling out a software-based platform that lets customers participate in video conferences on a range of devices, a key capability at a time when the workforce is becoming increasingly mobile and workers are using a variety of computing products.
Pexip officials, who unveiled the company in June, announced Sept. 10 that their Pexip Infinity platform is now generally available. The company also is offering a Pexip mobile application for Apple iOS devices, which enables users to not only participate in video conferences but also to control the conferences and view presentations from their iPhone or iPad.
Co-founder and CEO Simon Teigre told eWEEK that his company has about 50 customers—including four that are in the Fortune 500—that are interested in Pexip Infinity, ranging from telecommunications vendors and health care companies to law firms, high-tech businesses and retailers.
“We have a pretty broad set of customers now buying or [testing] Pexip Infinity,” he Teigre said.
The interest in video conferencing took off during the global recession, as businesses looked for ways to trim expenses, including travel costs. They have since found additional benefits in such areas as training and improving employee productivity.
However, recent trends—including greater workforce mobility and bring-your-own-device (BYOD)—are rapidly changing the video conferencing landscape, moving the industry away from larger, more expensive room-based systems to software and cloud solutions that enable users to participate in video conferences anywhere and from any device. IDC analysts in August noted the continued downward trend in video conferencing equipment revenues in the second quarter, but said that wasn’t an indication that interest in video collaboration is waning.
“Despite the overall weak 2Q13 results in the worldwide enterprise videoconferencing equipment market, we are still seeing interest in videoconferencing being driven by integrations with vendors’ unified communications and collaboration portfolios, and the proliferation of video among desktop and mobile users,” Petr Jirovsky, senior research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Networking Trackers Research, said in a statement at the time. “Video as a key component of collaboration continues to place high on the list of priorities for many organizations.”
Established players Cisco Systems and Polycom continue to be the leaders in the video conferencing fields, but the changing demands are giving rise to a range of smaller vendors—such as Pexip, Blue Jeans Networks and Vidyo—that are offering software-based platforms.
Teigre said a key for Pexip’s platform is its ability to easily scale, something that other vendors can struggle with. Pexip Infinity can be rapidly deployed—within 15 minutes in some instances—on two or more virtual machines and, as a software-based solution, can be easily upgraded. It also can be deployed on any industry-standard server from any vendor, Teigre said.
It’s managed through a simple interface and offers a distributed architecture that the CEO said can reduce WAN bandwidth by as much as 30 to 90 percent over competitive offerings. In addition, the company’s licensing model enables customers to easily scale their conferencing capacity up or down, depending on demand.