Hackensack, New Jersey-based Vidyo made some exciting announcements today, further evidence of its continued efforts to provide innovative HD video conferencing solutions, expand its product offerings, and advance its market edge.

 

Vidyo (News - Alert) today secured $15 million in funding, bringing it closer to the goal of expanding its sales, marketing and product development efforts as well as better supporting its growing customer base and partners.

 

Menlo Ventures led the latest funding round and was joined by existing investors: Rho Ventures, Sevin Rosen Funds and Star Ventures. With this new funding round, Menlo Ventures' (News - Alert) Managing Director, Doug Carlisle, joins the Vidyo Board.

 

"We see Vidyo's potential to disrupt the video conferencing market," said Menlo Ventures' Managing Director, Doug Carlisle. "In monitoring the company's development over the past six months, we have observed their formation of important partnerships and rapid market acceptance. We are convinced that Vidyo will see significant growth in 2009."

 

Vidyo also announced the appointment of Ezra Sofer as the company’s new chief financial officer, who brings more than 20 years of experience in finance management and operations positions to the company.

 

According to Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro, "Ezra brings to Vidyo a broad base of experience and an in-depth knowledge of corporate finance. With his proven leadership across the financial and operations spectrum, we are confident that Ezra will be an asset to all areas of Vidyo's business. I am happy to welcome him to our team."

 

In addition to this news, Vidyo also signed a new deal with Teliris, a provider of immersive telepresence solutions.

 

With this partnership, Teleris has licensed VidyoTechnology in an effort to enhance specific elements of its product portfolio. VidyoTechnology will enable Teliris (News - Alert) to become one of the first companies to deliver telepresence using the latest video standard -- H.264/SVC. This standard is a huge advancement over older video technologies that are often used by other telepresence providers.

 

"We welcome Vidyo into our family of strong and innovative partners," said Marc Trachtenberg (News - Alert), Teliris CEO and co-founder, "and look forward to a long relationship of leveraging Vidyo technology."

 

Marty Hollander, Vidyo’s senior vice president of marketing, discussed with Technology Marketing Corporation what these latest announcements mean for the video conferencing market and for the company.

 

 

MH: Our investors believe that Vidyo has tremendous potential, given the superiority of its multipoint HD video conferencing technology that they have validated by meeting with many of Vidyo’s customers. These investors want Vidyo to continue growing its share of the market rapidly. This funding allows Vidyo to expand its marketing and sales efforts at an accelerated rate, as well as increase its investment in engineering.

 

The video conferencing market remains extremely healthy even during these tough economic times. The ROI on a VidyoConferencing purchase is well under 12 months. We are seeing increasing customer demand for conferencing, and have even seen a customer replace its legacy HD equipment from another provider with the VidyoConferencing solution.

 

 

MH: As stated above, our investors want Vidyo to continue growing its share of the market rapidly. This funding allows Vidyo to expand its marketing and sales efforts at an accelerated rate, as well as increase its investment in engineering.

 

 

MH: This market is growing because the demand for high-quality, face-to-face video meetings can finally be met by today’s technology. The Internet provides enough capacity to handle HD quality video as long as the solutions have the right architecture to deal with packet loss and latency.  That is, solutions that don’t introduce the additional latency which makes video communication unnatural and uncomfortable. The challenge in a multipoint, rate-matched video conference is that latency introduced by an MCU can destroy natural communication. That is why Telepresence (News - Alert) has proliferated - since it requires connection among like units over dedicated bandwidth.

 

Vidyo has demonstrated that Personal Telepresence is now possible over the Internet to anyone, anywhere they need to meet, as long as they have an Internet connection. People using business-class HD video conferencing on their desktops are immediately engaged in the meeting.  Expectations are now finally being met for what users have been wanting from a video conferencing solution for many years.

 

 

MH: Potentially, room telepresence systems will now be able to connect with desktops, enabling a broadening of use and access by anyone.

 

 

MH: Vidyo believes that H.264/SVC (Scalable Video Coding) is the standard of the future for video conferencing. We hope that the Teliris partnership demonstrates that this standard now delivers video quality that meets the most demanding requirements.