Well, I can’t prove it to you, but I had made a bet with myself that ViVu would be the next to get gobbled up. Their video technology was too good for the consumer-grade platform they were selling. And today Polycom announced that they closed an (undisclosed amount) all-cash deal for ViVu.
Although Polycom is saying all the right things about existing customers continuing to be supported, you can bet that ViVu’s existing products will cease to exist in short order. As a matter of fact, I went to the website address for ViVu and got redirected to a Polycom page with a two-sentence note “To prospective customers: Thank you for your interest in ViVu, now part of the Polycom family. Please contact us for more information.”
In other words, “We are not particularly interested in selling small-potatoes licenses to Skype users. We plan to make this an integrated part of big-ticket enterprise video conferencing packages. Call us if you have some serious money to throw around.”
Congratulations to the ViVu gang, who always amused me by holding their video briefings from an old couch. Truly a Silicon Valley garage development success story.
Who’s next? I’d say the videoconferencing craze is probably going to put Vidyo on the short list for the M&A due diligence squads.
