London and Hackensack, NJ, November 7, 2012 – Vidyo, Inc., the first company to deliver personal telepresence, and Imago Group plc, Europe’s largest video solutions company, today announced that Imago will become the first European "hosted distributor" of Vidyo’s award-winning videoconferencing solutions. Imago has built a hosted service, VaaS-t (Video as a Service-trade only), using Vidyo technology, which Imago’s reseller network will be able to sell to end-customers in a subscription model, removing the sales and deployment complexity of infrastructure deployment out of the equation.  The absence of any capital outlay will permit users to enjoy cost-effective, risk-free adoption of video conferencing, while enabling resellers to convert the current high levels of interest in video-conferencing into a revenue stream far more quickly.

The hosted service will be available from November 1st in the UK, France, Holland and Belgium. Imago will continue to offer the full range of Vidyo products that they have been distributing since November, 2010. To learn more about VaaS-t, please click here.

“With this Vidyo-based hosted service, VaaS-t, we are now able to offer our reseller network the ability to provide end-users an affordable, telepresence-quality visual communication service that is easily accessed over the Internet or general purpose IP networks, " said Ian Vickerage, managing director of Imago Group PLC. "This service will be particularly well-suited for companies that don’t have the in-house IT expertise to deploy and manage hardware and software. Accessing our video conferencing service will be no more complicated than renting a movie online."

According to a survey commissioned by Vidyo in the summer, 75% of UK businesses with a business-grade videoconferencing solution had received upgrade proposals in the last three years that involve writing off or replacing some or all of their existing videoconferencing hardware investment. Vidyo’s future proof software architecture significantly reduces the burden of such hardware write-offs by making software upgrades seamlessly available to customers with on-premise solutions or on hosted platforms provided by service providers.

"Imago is providing a great new option to its resellers and customers giving them access to videoconferencing as a service without requiring investments in on premise solutions that are hardware based. This new model democratizes access to high-quality and affordable video communications for businesses of all sizes, especially the small business segment," said Ashish Gupta, Vidyo's CMO and SVP of Corporate Development. "Further, this subscription model service built on Vidyo’s platform expands Imago's ability to deliver exceptional video conferencing solutions to customers looking for an infrastructure-less solution that can be used from popular business devices and right over the internet.”