Monday, May 12, 2008

VBrick teams with Akamai on live web video

By Efrain Viscarolasaga

The use of Internet video in enterprise settings -- from large companies to hospitals and universities -- has been steadily gaining ground. And VBrick Systems Inc., a maker of network devices to provide live, streaming video services to those enterprises, has grown with it.

But with a new product (aimed at taking streaming video to the public Internet), a new partner (Cambridge-based Akamai Technologies Inc.) and new funding on the way, executives at VBrick say the company is on the doorstep of even bigger things.

The Wallingford, Conn.-based company has expanded from about 80 employees and revenue in the low millions in 2001 to 126 employees and $30 million in revenue last year.

"We are in one of the most rapid growth periods in our history," said CEO Vincent Graziani, who was appointed last year after serving as CEO of Andover-based Sandburst Corp., which was acquired by Broadcom Corp. in 2006. "In mid-2007, we really started to hit our stride."

For the trailing 12 months, said Graziani, the company has brought in about $36 million in sales and expects to become profitable in 2008.

While executives confirmed that the company is in the process of closing a new round of funding, they would not provide details. The company's last round, its third, came in 2001, when it raised $22 million. Investors included Morgan Stanley Venture Partners of New York and Menlo Ventures of California.

Part of VBrick's latest growth comes from a new product line it launched last month in conjunction with a content delivery partnership with Akamai. The product allows enterprise customers -- of which VBrick has 1,500 -- to distribute live video content to the Internet, rather than just across an enterprise network.

"It's something a lot of our customers were asking for," said Graziani.

Because streaming video requires more bandwidth than stored content, the partnership with Akamai gives VBrick access to servers that not only can optimize the stream during live events, but can cache the event for future viewing or managing by the customer.

Stored video services in the public arena from companies like Cambridge-based Brightcove Inc. and Maven Networks Inc. (which was recently acquired by Yahoo Inc. for $160 million) have been exploding over the past few years. But analysts say the adoption of streaming services has been slower because of bandwidth and tech limitations. Over the past year, however, it has begun to catch on, with no signs of slowing down.

"Even 12 months ago, when we were talking about streaming video we talked about a lot of stuttering and buffering," said Vidya Nath, a senior industry analyst with Frost & Sullivan. "But the penetration of broadband is going so fast it has gotten much better and is going to grow phenomenally (over the next few years)."

While Nath did not have projections for streaming alone, his firm expects the enterprise content delivery networks market to be nearly $260 million in 2007 and predicts it to grow more than three times that number by 2010.