When Google+ first debuted in summer 2011, the feature most lauded was its free, multi-person video conferences called Hangouts. Their usefulness in holding virtual face-to-face meetings was instantly obvious, and several businesses (including Mashable) have implemented them as a videoconferencing tool.
However, as useful as Hangouts are, they're basically a standalone service, and they don't play nice with conference room systems or regular phone lines. That's where Vidyo comes in. The company, whose back-end technology helps power Hangouts, is launching a tool that will fold Google+ Hangouts into existing systems, finally bridging the gap between Hangouts and the boardroom.
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"It's a gateway product that, when installed, will allow you to call from a legacy room system to a Hangout," says Vidyo CEO Ofer Shapiro. "It gives you complete connectivity."
VidyoH2O is the first product to result from Vidyo's collaboration with Google. It lets companies use their existing videoconferencing hardware — whether it's from Cisco, Polycom, Avaya or others — with Hangouts. It also allows users to dial into Hangouts from regular phone lines, so remote users won't even need an Internet connection to join a conference, albeit in audio-only form.
Unlike Hangouts themselves, Vidyo's service isn't free: It starts at $99 a month for each concurrent user. That's for companies who want to host the necessary hardware themselves, but Vidyo also offers a cloud-based version — where the server and bandwidth are handled by Vidyo's back end — for $149 per user per month.
"The advantages are obvious," says Shapiro. "It makes B2B calls easier. Even if you buy [systems] from the same vendor, it's sometimes very hard to set up the call. If you have a solution that's hosted like VidyoH2O, it provides a point in the 'sky' to connect those two systems together."
Shapiro says Vidyo has other products in the pipeline to further bridge Hangouts and enterprise, although he didn't specify what they were.
Another service is also launching a Google+ Hangouts tool: UberConference now lets users dial into Hangouts via regular phone lines, too. Although it's not a full enterprise Hangouts solution like Vidyo's, the service adds a dial-in number to the Hangout as well as a recording tool. The service offers toll-free access in 40 countries and costs $10 per user per month.
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