On The Heels Of Another Record Year, Vidyo Introduces Virtualized Video Conferencing

Video conferencing startup Vidyo continues to grow, thanks to the help of service provider partnerships and through sales to various enterprise, government and health agencies. The company claimed another record year for 2012, as it competes against traditional video conferencing solutions. It’s trying to make adopting its technology easier and cheaper, especially for large resellers and enterprises, with the introduction of products that work through a new, virtualized infrastructure.

Vidyo claims to have grown billings by 68 percent in 2012. A lot of that has come through partners: Vidyo says business through its top 25 reseller partners has expanded 435 percent over the course of 2012. Partnering with service providers has the benefit of recurring revenue and being in new markets. Now more than half of billings come from international markets, according to the company.

Hoping to further capitalize on that growth, Vidyo will soon make available a new virtualized infrastructure that will lower the cost for enterprises to deploy video conferencing services. The new products, the VidyoGateway and VidyoPortal Virtual Editions (VE), should provide video conferencing services at the same price as audio conferencing.

Rather than deploy expensive, hardware-based equipment, the virtualized architecture will allow clients to quickly turn up services using off-the-shelf equipment. According to Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro, will also help enterprise customers to cost-effectively manage conferencing across multiple sites. There are huge benefits for Vidyo’s service provider partners as well, as they can make those services available all over the world.

For Vidyo, introduction of its new infrastructure follows a broader trend toward virtualization, rather than running on traditional server hardware. It also provides more flexibility for clients who will be able to run either on-premises equipment, private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud offerings. The VidyoGateway VE and VidyoPortal VE will be available for sale in the second quarter of this year.

Vidyo is based in Hackensack, N.J., and now has more than 250 employees worldwide. It’s raised about $100 million to date, with investors such as QuestMark Partners, Menlo Ventures, Rho Ventures, Star Ventures, Four Rivers Group and Juniper Networks.