Last week, Polycom purchased ViVu, a video collaboration software that can be embedded into web applications, making this Polycom’s third major acquisition this year as it positions itself to pounce on an anticipated explosion in the video collaboration market. ViVu was founded in 2008 and raised $3M series A in September 2009. They had a great start introducing multiparty video calling for Skype, but was probably unable to keep up the momentum and had to raise series B or sell. If I had to guess, I would say the ViVu acquisition price was around $10-15M.
Earlier in the year Polycom purchased Accordent Technologies “a leading provider of video content management and delivery solutions,” expanding their market to video use cases from “live webcasts in the studio” to “user-generated content from the desktop.” Following that was their June purchase of HP’s Visual Collaboration Business Unit (which included Halo Telepresence products), filling a hole in their unified communication offerings and putting them in more direct competition with Cisco.
This new alliance between Polycom and ViVu now happily puts Polycom in the running for video collaboration anywhere – on mobile, on desktop, and anywhere with a web browser. It also relieves ViVu of duking it out on its own in an increasingly competitive video collaboration arena.
Is Polycom making the right purchases? Where do you think Polycom is heading?
