Pexip Videoconferencing from Previous Tandberg and Cisco Execs

Pexip is a new videoconferencing vendor that has been released by former executives of Cisco and Tandberg, and is expected to sell 100 percent via the channel. Tandberg was acquired by Cisco in 2009.

Pexip Infinity was debuted by the Oslo, Norway-based company (that also has offices in London and New York), and is a software-based videoconferencing platform.

The co-founder and CEO of Pexip, Simen Teigre, it set to look at partnering with solution providers from the traditional video markets and the software space to drive sales of the new Infinity solution.

Tiegre said: “We will be going 100 percent through partners or resellers. We are strongly focused on building trust-based, business-founded relationships, and we believe there is a great opportunity here to support the reseller business with our solution, complementing what they already sell, and also to make it easier for them to transition into more recurring, sticky and services-based customer relationships.”

The  Pexip CTO, Håkon Dahle, was previously the vice president and CTO of Cisco's Collaboration Technology group, and the Vice President of Engineering at the company, Giles Chamberlin, was formerly the software engineering director of telepresence applications at Cisco. As a result of the Tandberg acquisition, both Dahle and Chamberlin came to Cisco.

Tiegre said: “We have a team from Tandberg and Cisco and it's a pretty experienced team, both on the commercial side and the engineering side. We are combining this experience with our extreme passion, I would say, for the videoconferencing industry and collaboration, in general.”

Pexip Infinity was developed by the Pexip team, and seeks to move away from  traditional videoconferencing solutions by providing a scalable, software-based platform which can work regardless of the end point or device.

Tiegre stated that Infinity is compatible with any existing install base of business video endpoints and software-based clients such as Microsoft Lync and WebRTC. Furthermore, Infinity is able to operate on industry-standard x86-based services and does not need custom hardware

Infinity is described as a “truly virtualized conferencing platform” by Pexip, and this means that it is made up of a collection of virtual machines which operate on x86-based servers, and can work with virtualization tools that users already have in place. According to the company, users can also increase port capacity on-demand through the virtualization element, and can perform upgrades with zero downtime.

WAN bandwidth consumption can be conserved with Infinity by allowing conference participants to dial in a local code instead of a centralized or shared one. Up to 20 conference participants are able to lower bandwidth consumption by 90 percent via this approach, according to Tiegre.

A Pexip Infinity app for Apple’s iOS is also available, and this allows users to dial in to conferences via their iPhones and iPads. In the next few weeks, an Android app will also be made available.

Tiegre said: “We think it's a pretty revolutionary product in the industry. It's the first scalable software platform for fully interoperable video meetings, as well as voice meetings. It supports any collaboration end point or client out there, whether hardware or software, and has some pretty unique advantages.”

Tampa, Florida-based AVI-SPL, is one of the biggest solution providers in the videoconferencing market, and has signed on with Pexip as a partner. The executive vice president of Video and Unified Communications at AVI-SPL, Michael Brandofino, stated that Pexip Infinity is different to other videoconferencing solutions on the market today as it can support a number of users and devices, and does not need investments in infrastructure.

Brandofino said: “The gap that has been in the industry is that there are obviously great products out there, but there haven't really been products available that can scale with all the devices that are out there today. The infrastructure was just too expensive and you couldn't scale it effectively.”

However, Pexip changes that. Brandofino continued: “Pexip Infinity fills this gap by having a true, multitenant, scalable and software-based platform that will enable us to scale to support any type of end point that is out there today.”

Further to reselling Pexip Infinity, AVI-SPL is able to power AVI-SPL's new virtual meeting rooms by using Infinity, which launched on Wednesday. AVI-SPL customers can be serviced through virtual rooms, and this means that they can tap into a virtual meeting space regardless of the end points. The SMB market will find this service most beneficial, because costly video equipment is not always an option.

Brandofino said: “The idea is to enable the everyday user to have this meeting place or this meeting room without having to invest in the infrastructure.”

Tiegre of Pexip stated that his company does have a formal partner program in place, but is being “selective” regarding its early partners. However, the company remains committed to increasing growth within the channel.

Tiegre added: “Our focus on selling through partners is important, and we think we can offer some really cool opportunities to them.” (CY) Link