Enterprise Connect – Vidyo, Inc., the first company to deliver personal telepresence, today announced the VidyoRouter™ Virtual Edition (VE), its next leap forward in massively-scalable, high-quality video conferencing, will be demonstrated at Enterprise Connect and available later this year. Vidyo was the first to virtualize the media plane to deliver scalable multipoint telepresence quality video conferencing in virtual computing environments. VidyoRouter VE provides enterprises and service providers with unprecedented deployment flexibility in terms of their video conferencing infrastructure, enhancing their ability to meet usage needs and maximize investments.
“As an existing Vidyo Service Provider, we believe Vidyo’s support for virtualization presents a great opportunity for us,” said Clive Sawkins, CEO of BCS Global Networks Limited, a leading worldwide provider of managed video conferencing, telepresence and visual collaboration services. “The big differentiation in Vidyo’s strategy is that they can virtualize the media plane, which means we will be able to serve our existing customers much more efficiently, expand their footprints and enter new markets with greater speed, easily enabling customers who are looking to use video communications capabilities. We have been working with Vidyo for several years now and the Vidyo platform is the basis of our iView Managed Telepresence and Video Collaboration service. We are already very impressed with the quality, flexibility and affordability of the Vidyo solution; being able to virtualize it is yet another major boost for us and our customers.”
A recent Market Analysis report from Gartner (Competitive Landscape: SMB Videoconferencing Will Come from the Cloud, Worldwide; Published: 23 September 2011) advised vendors to “focus more effort on software-driven solutions for endpoints and infrastructure — these will provide both the cost points and the agility needed to develop new functions quickly in comparison to hardware-based solutions.” In the report Senior Analyst Scott Morrison stated, “Most SMBs don’t have the capital resources for traditional infrastructure or expensive endpoints, nor do they have dedicated IT staff capable of supporting such environments. Capturing that untapped market requires new approaches: software-based infrastructure solutions delivered from the cloud, coupled with softclients and low-cost group systems, all of which should be easy to use.”
“A virtualized VidyoRouter enables the enterprise and service providers to deploy on existing data center hardware or in the public cloud. They can provision capacity on-demand wherever and whenever needed, plus deliver video conferencing services across the globe without having to invest in dedicated appliances and fixed capacities and even get disaster recovery capacity for free,” said Ofer Shapiro, co-founder and CEO of Vidyo. “VidyoRouter VE is the only solution that virtualizes the media plane for massive scalability on demand with low latency and high call density per virtual processing resource.”
VidyoRouter Virtual Edition
VidyoRouter VE delivers the VidyoRouter’s unique functionality and performance within virtual computing environments such as VMware (When VidyoRouter VE becomes GA later this year, it will be available on VMware’s industry-leading virtualization platform.) All VidyoRouter editions deliver natural, universal and affordable video conferencing to mobile devices, PCs, room and telepresence systems over general purpose IP networks. Using Vidyo’s patented Adaptive Video Layering™ technology to eliminate the latency and intensive processing requirements of transcoding required by traditional MCU based solutions, VidyoRouter delivers individually optimized, low-latency video streams for any endpoint over any IP network. As a result, VidyoRouter VE is uniquely able to deliver the very high concurrent connection density per virtual machine processing resource and native firewall traversal that is necessary to achieve cost effective scale. Equally as important, it offers unmatched flexibility by bringing new geographies online in minutes and delivers a high level of business continuity assurance for video communications without the need to purchase and deploy redundant hardware appliances.
Benefits to Enterprise and Service Providers
Enterprises and service providers can now deliver HD videoconferencing with the same award-winning capabilities and quality associated with Vidyo’s physical VidyoRouter. Sharing licenses between sites and moving capacity between them are now possible creating a multiple of additional cost savings for multi-time zone operation or when disaster recover site needs to be created.
For enterprise customers, VidyoRouter VE reduces the costs of deployment and wide area network usage since it can be deployed on cloud computing resources anywhere in the world in minutes. This capability enables the enterprise to distribute the video conferencing infrastructure so that traffic can be localized anywhere there is a pocket of users, keeping more traffic on the lower cost LAN bandwidth and off of the higher cost WAN. For example, in the event that a company opens a new branch office, it has the flexibility to use its virtual VidyoRouters to enable the new branch office to immediately gain local access to VidyoConferencing. Additionally, the virtualized VidyoRouter leverages the existing capacity of an enterprise’s private or public data centers, which means no additional or purpose built hardware is required in any location to support the build-out of a distributed multipoint conferencing fabric.
With VidyoRouter VE, service providers can now offer unlimited multipoint scalability and low latency rate matching capability on-demand to accelerate the adoption of high quality, universal video conferencing on any endpoint. The product allows service providers to enter into new markets with little investment and risk by utilizing available cloud compute capacity instead of investing in physical plant and equipment ahead of demand or until a market is proven. As those markets grow, the service provider can add capacity on demand in any region of service coverage by spinning up new instances of VidyoRouter VE equipped with floating concurrent connection licenses that are shared among all VidyoRouters in the network. The product provides service providers the opportunity to integrate with enterprise private deployment to make seamless transitions for corporate users to public networks using the same device. This capability drives utilization for the service provider and delivers greater value to the enterprise and its end users.
VidyoRouter VE has been named a finalist for the Best of Enterprise Connect award, which recognizes exhibitors who have made significant technological advancements within the enterprise communications industry. Conference attendees are invited to see VidyoRouter VE in action, and demos of other Vidyo solutions, including VidyoPanorama and VidyoMobile, at Enterprise Connect, Booth #631.
In a separate release, Vidyo also announced today that it is launching a White Label Program for resellers and distributors to offer co-branded hosted Vidyo services directly to their own customers without having to incur the costs of infrastructure, administration, maintenance and installation of a video conferencing system.
The Vidyo Difference
The Vidyo communication and collaboration platform is software-based, highly flexible and can be easily customized for individual enterprise and vertical market video conferencing needs. The patented VidyoRouter™ architecture introduces Adaptive Video Layering, which dynamically optimizes the video for each endpoint leveraging H.264 Scalable Video Coding (SVC)-based compression technology and Vidyo’s IP. Adaptive Video Layering eliminates the MCU and offers unprecedented error resiliency, low latency rate matching thus enabling natural, affordable, high-quality video to work over the Internet, LTE and 4G networks. The platform allows users to quickly leverage the latest hardware innovations and new consumer devices, making it uniquely attractive to partners. Vidyo has been active driving H.264 SVC and SIP videoconferencing interoperability in various standards bodies since 2005.