VCON-driven alliance pushes hosted IP videoconferencing

(Telephony) VCON has brought together disparate IP videoconferencing specialists in an effort to package and deliver hosted IP video for service providers and broadband IP carriers, who can then market those services to end-user commercial customers.

Called Karyo, the alliance is “the service provider’s service provider,” said Gordon Daugherty, VCON’s senior vice president of global marketing. Initial Karyo members, in addition to VCON, are Activate, MegaPath, RADVISION, V-SPAN and VTEL Solutions.

“There’s a little bit of overlap in all the offerings that the various Karyo partners provide, but underneath this initiative we all realize that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” said Daugherty.

Karyo will give service providers a solution they can pitch to their large commercial customers as a way to alleviate the need for in-house videoconferencing capabilities.

“The target market for Karyo is not the large commercial customer,” he said. “The target market for Karyo is the regional or nationwide service provider that may have that large commercial customer. We’re knocking on the doors of regional ISPs and nationwide CLECs and carriers of various sorts pitching the value proposition of video.”

Service providers, he said, need a way to generate more revenue using existing infrastructures.

“Our response is to ask if they’ve thought about streaming and interactive video as an application that can ride over this infrastructure,” he added.

Service providers will be able to tap different areas of expertise within the Karyo alliance.

“None of us have all the things they’re going to need, so you bring all of us together and [then] we pretty much do have everything the service provider’s going to need,” he concluded.