TENET’s staff was recently in Lisbon as guests of Vidyo Inc., suppliers of the videoconferencing we use to support the work of the higher education and research communities in South Africa. The purpose of this meeting was to take part in the inaugural user group for main Vidyo customers in the EMEA region.
Speaking about the event, our NREN Exchange Fellow Rob Bristow was in attendance and said Vidyo had brought along some significantly senior people such as their CEO Eran Westman, their Chief Revenue Officer, Senior Product Engineer as well a host of other key personnel in the Vidyo EMEA setup.
Rob explained that Vidyo had a lot to share at this meeting, such as the way other organisations had implemented their Vidyo setups. Amongst these were Jisc (UK NREN), CERN, a major teaching hospital in the UK, players of financial services and a leading UK newspaper. Interestingly, most of these organisations are using Vidyo though the API’s that allows one to build your own video-enabled app for specialised functions which incorporate the excellence of Vidyo’s video and audio technologies.
Vidyo also showed off their new plans. Top of the list for these in terms of relevance to TENET is the imminent arrival of VidyoDesktop Neo – a complete re-engineering of the desktop App, using web technologies with a simplified and up to date looking interface. They also laid out the road map for further enhancements in the Neo App, with monthly releases and new features being added regularly. In addition, there are also some useful enhancements to the VidyoPortal, Router and Gateway, but these details weren’t at hand at the time. However, there are significant enhancements to Vidyo’s streaming abilities due in the next few months.
Vidyo, like many vendors is focussing increasingly on ways of delivering its product through a cloud type arrangement. This leverages the economies of scale of cloud solutions and allows organisations to forget about infrastructure and get on with using the product for their collaboration requirements.
One interesting extension of the cloud offering is called Vidyo.io which allows developers to create apps that embed Vidyo technologies and use VidyoCloud for the connectivity while monetising their app through a revenue sharing arrangement with Vidyo. Vidyo said the API’s on which this approach depends are being enhanced and made more developer friendly, which should aid the adoption.
One idea that has been around for a while in discussions with Vidyo and Q Distribution (the South African Vidyo distributor) is to offer the platform to the South African higher education community – focussing on computer science departments in a competition format to see what kind of applications these students can come up with. There may also be scope to offer approaches and some incubation support to help them bring their ideas to market which looks promising.
Rounding up his last thoughts regarding this event, Rob said it was certainly a useful few days and added that being in such a lovely city was a bonus. He noted that TENET can be safe in the knowledge that it has invested in a first rate product with a serious enterprise level development road map laid out in front of it. He also noted that the ability of Vidyo to continue supporting the work of our country’s research and higher education is well assured.
