Vidyo and Cisco make announcements that show the promise of cloud-based and virtualized video deployments.

Some interesting developments lately on how high-definition video conferencing is being delivered to businesses. First up is Vidyo. The company is tweaking its video conferencing software so it can run in a virtualized server environment. This will let enterprises or service providers deploy it in data centers or run it in public clouds such as those operated by Amazon and Rackspace.

Server virtualization has been a big trend for more than a year now in PBX development circles. Because the vast majority of PBXs these days are simply software residing on Linux or Windows servers, pairing it with server virtualization technology has been more or less a no-brainer during the year or so that VMware, Citrix and Microsoft have made their hypervisors friendly to real-time communications apps. Benefits range from reduced hardware costs, simpler administration, improved flexibility, and (for the few comms platforms that can take advantage of VMware high availability services) greater reliability.

But to date there hasn't been similar pairing of virtualization and video conferencing technology. This is in part because video conferencing platforms tend to require dedicated hardware-based MCUs to make multipoint conferences possible, and solutions relying heavily on dedicated hardware don’t lend themselves well to server virtualization architectures. Vidyo’s MCU-less solution design, on the other hand, can run with VMware's hypervisor and be deployed in public or private clouds. It’s just a proof of concept project at this point. But it could lead to some interesting developments as service providers adopt virtualized Vidyo solutions as the basis for their cloud-based video conferencing services.

Vidyo and its partners--such as Auralink, Connexus, GlobalComm--are not the only ones preparing cloud-based video conferencing services. Mirial, Vidtel and Nefsis have been offering much the same sort of thing. And LifeSize announced a cloud-based service over the summer. LifeSize Connections is expected to cost $100 per end point per month, or $30 per month per desktop client. It is in beta testing now, is expected to be internationally available by the end of the year, and will eventually replace Mirial’s cloud-based service, which has been part of the LifeSize portfolio since Logitech acquired Mirial a few months back.

Cisco also introduced a cloud-based video conferencing service a couple weeks ago. Re-announced it, rather, since this is the second time Callway has been publicly unveiled. The first was back in March 2010 in the last of Tandberg's pre-Cisco days. The plan was for it to be generally available by the end of that year, but getting acquired by Cisco derailed that particular train. To be perfectly honest, I never gave Callway a second thought after that. I figured Cisco had given it the old heave-ho since Callway is a service that Cisco, not its service provider partners, hosts itself. As it turns out, Callway was simply delayed. Field trials started in late 2010, it entered limited availability in February 2011, and is now generally available. In that time Cisco has expanded availability to Canada (it was to be a US-only offering when Tandberg first announced it) and added support for a wider range of end points have been added.

Offering one's own hosted services is a tack taken by IBM, Interactive Intelligence, Microsoft, Mitel, Siemens Enterprise and, though they don’t draw much attention to it, Avaya. But despite having a platform on which it could easily build communications services hosted in its own data centers, Cisco has been very cautious about positioning itself as a provider of services of the hosted, cloud or SaaS persuasion. When it has launched subscription services they have been in areas that (1) don't really conflict with providers that use Cisco technology as the basis for their own services and (2) help Cisco face off against Microsoft which has its own SaaS offerings. If WebEx is the most successful of Cisco's SaaS offerings, then short-lived Cisco Mail is perhaps the least. The umi video conferencing service for consumers, still around despite articles that say otherwise, falls somewhere in the middle; it’s unclear if Cisco will be able to build a critical mass of customers for it.

With Callway, Cisco is now trying its hand at a hosted video conferencing service for businesses. I suppose the company feels Callway’s SMB focus will help it avoid conflicting with its many partners offering hosted telepresence services based on Cisco technology. Hosted telepresence, after all, costs a bundle, so AT&T, Orange Business and others have their sights firmly set on large enterprises. In the SMB video conferencing services space, Cisco is facing off against Vidtel, a service provider outside the Cisco partner program; LifeSize, a direct competitor in the video conferencing space; and Microsoft, whose Lync Online service will, and Skype assets currently do, provide video conferencing services to SMBs. Will Cisco's new venture into self-hosted video conferencing services for SMBs be a WebEx success or PostPath flop? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Next page: A closer look at Callway pricing