Vidyo's Clowd

Recurring themes at this year's Enterprise Connect were cloud, video, hybrid, and cPaaS. Every major UC offer at the conference addressed at least one of these categories, and a very small group of vendors/providers hit all of them. Thanks to a recent announcement Vidyo was one of them. Vidyo launched a new cloud service that adds new consumption options including hybrid models to its portfolio.

It's a unique cloud offer because it includes both video conferencing as a service as well as cPaaS as it extends Vidyo's APIs from products to include services. This moves Vidyo from software developer only to being a service provider of its own technologies.

The company is confident its software is cloud-ready because of several large private cloud implementations by some of its customers including Bloomberg, US Department of Defense, and CERN Laboratories. Bloomberg's Global Head of AV and Media Technology, Jeffrey Fairbanks, presented to Enterprise Connect attendees a glimpse into his detailed evaluation that included requirements for a consistent user experience from custom applications and video conferencing room systems.

The new cloud service is based on Vidyo's VidyoWorks technology stack which supports H.264 and VP8/VP9 (WebRTC) codecs in qualities as high as 4k. The hosted video conferencing service can be combined into a hybrid model with existing or new premises-based deployments. This hybrid option can be used with both video conferencing or custom applications.

While all of these segments are interesting individually, it is the combined portfolio that really sets this new offer apart. Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, Vidyo can now simultaneously meet the needs of multiple enterprise constituents. CIOs will gravitate toward enterprise video conferencing while development teams will find the API sandbox more inviting. Cloud services make technology accessible on a pay-as-you-go model without commitment or upfront capital investment.

Vidyo's big claim to fame is its SVC routing technology which reduces bandwidth and eliminates the need for costly transcoding. This decentralizes processing and distributes the network load while providing increased tolerance to variable network conditions. These characteristics are particularly relevant with mobile applications, hybrid solutions, and thin client (VDI) deployments.

The Vidyo portfolio offers organizations a single solution for (audio/web/video) conferencing, gateway services to other video systems, integration with other services, and APIs and SDKs for custom application development. The cloud offer also increases flexibility with regards to deployment and financial models.

Dave MIchels is a Contributing Editor and Analyst at TalkingPointz.