Hosted Videoconferencing Startup Videxio Intros New Management Portal For Partners, Users

Startup Videxio this week launched a new management portal that gives users and partners tighter control over its hosted videoconferencing service.

The new portal, called MyVidexio, serves as a central location for network administrators or solution providers to track consumption of the Videxio cloud service -- either by an organization, as a whole or by individual user -- as well as perform remote monitoring and diagnostics on the tool.

MyVidexio also lets users manage and change their Videxio subscriptions.

Related: Startup Videxio Helping Channel Capitalize On Videoconferencing-as-a-Service Trend

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"It is basically a user portal to help users of the service have better control and management of their video experience," said Karl Hantho, president of Videxio's Americas business.

While Videxio partners already had access to a set of subscription management tools, they too can now leverage the MyVidexio portal to track usage of the Videxio service and its performance.

Julian Phillips, executive vice president at Whitlock, a global AV solution provider and No. 98 on CRN's 2014 Solution Provider 500 List, said Whitlock will leverage the MyVidexio portal to more quickly provision Videxio's videoconferencing service, and to keep tabs on which customers are consuming that service and at what level of quality.

"As a service provider, there is a whole range of benefits for us," Phillips said. "One of those is the ability to be able to easily provision a service to a user. We already had that provisioning capability, but this just makes that really, really simple."

Whitlock white-labels the Videxio offering and takes it to market as its own hosted service. The Richmond, Va.-based company has rebranded the Videxio offering as "v-Concert, powered by Videxio."

Phillips said v-Concert, which rolled out in late 2013, is starting to gain traction within Whitlock's customer base and he expects adoption of the service to grow significantly moving into 2015. He noted that large enterprise customers -- which represent the majority of Whitlock's business -- tend to migrate to cloud services such as Videxio a bit more slowly than their smaller counterparts.

Still, he said, the interest in Whitlock's v-Concert service is definitely there.

"There is a huge interest out there with customers to move to the cloud model," Phillips said. "Some of these [v-Concert] deployments are potentially tens and tens of thousands of users, so we expect to see the real revenue throughput into 2015. We are expecting really significant growth."

Videxio, founded in 2011 by former executives of Tandberg, the video communications equipment maker acquired by Cisco Systems in 2009, sells 100 percent through the channel.

The company, based in Oslo, Norway, has roughly 26 partners in the U.S. and about 55 worldwide, according to Hantho.

While Videxio competitors such as Blue Jean Networks also have opened their doors to the channel, Videxio said its model is especially unique in that almost all partners, such as Whitlock, rebrand and sell its service as their own.

Videxio is starting to see interest from bigger, "billion-dollar-plus" solution providers, including those that partner with video and collaboration giants such as Cisco, said Hantho. He also said Videxio is on-boarding new partners more quickly than it has in the past.

"The sales cycle to recruit and bring a partner into our platform is shortening, which I think is a sign that either, No. 1, we are becoming more accepted or, No. 2, that the market is starting to become more clear of the opportunity that is there [with videoconferencing-as-a-service]," Hantho said.

Hosted collaboration and videoconferencing systems such as Videxio's are being embraced more than ever by businesses as a lower-cost and more flexible alternative to traditional hardware-based systems. Industry research firm Infonetics said in August that it expects the hosted unified communications market overall to reach $12 billion by 2018 with 62.6 million seats in service.

Videxio doesn't share specific sales or revenue figures, but Hantho said the company is definitely seeing growth, with usage of its service, now deployed in 125 countries, having tripled since July.

PUBLISHED OCT. 30, 2014