Deal Radar 2008: IVT

This story was written by Sramana Mitra.

Online Video is becoming a powerful business tool, spawning a significant number of innovative companies. My continued interest in the sector stems from the fact that I am very interested in seeing gratuitous business travel disappear. [See my Forbes column, Kill The Business Trip] On this installment of the Deal Radar, I will review IVT, focused on the booming Online Collaboration market.

Beverly Hills-based Interactive Video Technologies (IVT) is one such, a leader in the production, management, and distribution of live and on-demand webcasting. IVT provides both Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premise licensed software solutions. IVT raised $3 million in a Series A venture round from Monitor Ventures and Tudor Investments in 2007.

IVT was co-founded in May 2005 by Greg Pulier and John Busfield, who together are responsible for a number of technology breakthroughs in the online video industry.

IVT Enterprise Video Communications Platform (EVCP) delivers a product suite that includes a media management and video portal with social computing abilities, a full-scale rich media webcasting publishing platform, and a desktop self-service webcasting application. In April 2008, the company unveiled the streaming media industry's first complete SaaS offering for its product suite. SaaS pricing starts at $1,475 per month for a primary content publisher.

In September 2008, the company launched IVT PrimeTime, whichitdubs "YouTube for the enterprise". PrimeTime is a wayto organize and share not only video, but all types of multimedia content. The solution will enable companies to expand the reach of their video communications and allow content creators and viewers to use social networkingto interact.PrimeTime also contains a variety of management functionsthat allow users to create channelsto organize content so that only those who have permission can actually view the content.

IVT has already found favor with a number of Fortune 1000 companies from a variety of industries. Cisco, AT&T, EDS, Oracle, Rohm & Haas, NEC Unified Solutions, Cramer, and Ernst & Young are some of the companies that use IVT products for video communication programs within their organizations. Further, IVT's Media Platform 4.0 has been nominated as a finalist in the 'Best Webcasting Platform' category in the second annual Streaming Media Readers' Choice Awards. We don't have any revenue disclosure from them, and not a lot of other statistics to extrapolate from.

Interactive Media Strategies, Frost and Sullivan, and ABI Research predict that video and rich media in the enterprise will grow to more than $2 billion by 2011 from the current $250 million.

The online collaboration market is expected to reach $9 billion by 2009, which explains why we have so many players carving out different niches and building interesting businesses. Several of these companies are already doing $20-$30 million in revenues (e.g. On24, Jive, Telanetix) will likely cross the $100 million revenue threshold by 2010, which means that in 2011 we should expect to see a series of initial public offerings in the collaboration-software market.

By Sramana Mitra

More from CBS News