A Conversation with Vidyo and Zimbra: A Match Made in Virtual Heaven

Vidyo:  We’re really excited to be working with Zimbra on extending their platform for email and calendaring with HD video communication. Zimbra’s platform demonstrates just how powerful and scalable virtual applications can be, and Vidyo is a natural fit.  Zimbra runs in a virtualized VMware environment and Vidyo can sit right alongside of Zimbra in the same virtual space.  This makes the deployment of an email and calendaring infrastructure that has video escalation built in a breeze.  It greatly reduces the overall effort and cost required for these services.  Anyone who has had to pay for traditional email systems like Exchange, and understands the costs of legacy video conferencing will immediately recognize the tremendous cost savings.

Zimbra:  For us, it’s all about tying those tools into our user experience so users can seamlessly  “right click” and go into a voice or video call.  The goal is to be able to escalate from working asynchronously with someone via email to working with that person via voice and video in real time.  From our perspective, a lot of task and action items that people do on a daily basis start in email, but they don’t necessarily end in email.  They either require that someone have a meeting or pick up the phone. To be able to seamlessly start  a HD Vidyo call right from your email or calendar, seems like a natural progression.

Vidyo: Most people these days work in a “bring your own device” environment and have a distributed work force; even a lot of contractors.  At the end of the day, what you have is people working in a lot of diverse environments communicating with a variety of different devices and networks.  When you think that these people need to be productive and get things done efficiently to move forward on projects and tasks, what it comes down to is the ability to communicate effectively.  And it’s been demonstrated many times that the most effect means of communicating is face-to-face; to be able to people’s reactions and expressions. Visual communications conveys so much more information than a written or voice-only exchange – especially when you’re in that kind of distributed work environment.

Zimbra:  Exactly.  From our perspective, a lot of task and action items that people do on a daily basis start in email, but they don’t necessarily end in email.  They either require that someone have an in-person meeting or pick up the phone. You need to go from asynchronous email to making decisions in real time with people. Zimbra wants to  bring the right communication tools, specifically reliable real-time communication tools, into our experience and create options for escalations and work-flows that the end user can have right at their fingertips to collaboratively move forward, be productive, get things done, close off action items, complete tasks, work on projects together, and collaborate more effectively.  Vidyo’s is ideally suited to work with Zimbra, because, unlike other video conferencing technologies, it can be easily integrated with our virtual platform, plus delivers excellent visual and audio communications quality over the widest range of devices and networks.

Vidyo:  Vidyo is seeing an explosion of web applications, such as Zimbra, that offer features and usability directly from a browser.  As more and more applications move towards becoming web applications, the need for native collaboration grows.  Embedding video conferencing directly into the application’s browser interface is the next evolution in collaboration.  As such, Vidyo is moving towards providing the same level of quality and usability customers are used to inside the browser and/or downloadable clients for various desktop and mobile form factors.

Zimbra:  When that happens, we are completely on board.  We ultimately want to be able to deliver a web app through the browser and not have to worry about what’s happening on the actual device at the operating system level – just having to think about the browser and what the browser is capable of.  What Zimbra offers today is simple and instantly upgradeable.