Eyeris Mobile makes boardroom-quality videoconferencing portable, affordable

Vox Pureview, the conferencing and collaboration specialist within the Vox Telecom group, says its new Eyeris Mobile Application is the first affordable app that offers boardroom-quality videoconferencing, no matter where the participants are.

“Eyeris Mobile bridges the gap between formal corporate videoconferencing and informal, consumer-level video chat applications,” says Vox Pureview's Gene van der Walt. “Formal videoconferencing has historically been very expensive. It could cost hundreds of thousands of rands to set up a couple of boardrooms, and even then most companies could only talk between branches. Breaking out of the corporate ecosystem was extremely difficult.”

Smaller companies who couldn't justify the expense resorted to informal videoconferencing with services like Skype, he says. “This is a huge market - but the informal and formal videoconferencing environments still couldn't talk to each other. There was still a gap in the market for applications to link corporate boardrooms with team members who are out of the office or with partners, clients and suppliers who don't have the same boardroom set-up.

“Eyeris Mobile is a hosted software application that will link the smaller corporate executive to his client who uses traditional boardroom systems,” says Van der Walt. “No matter what platform you're using, in a boardroom, in your office or on a mobile, we can connect multiple parties into the same videoconference.”

Van der Walt says Eyeris Mobile can be downloaded to a desktop, laptop or mobile phone and set up within minutes. “It works on any Apple or Android phone or tablet. It doesn't matter where you are, you can connect straight into the boardroom for a serious videoconference.”

Vox Pureview will launch the service as a free app to Vox customers, who can then buy bundles of videoconferencing time for a monthly fee. Prices start at R300 per month for the View120 package, which includes 120 minutes of conferencing time. At the top of the range, the View1000 packages includes a thousand minutes (over 16 hours) of conferencing time, as well as three user licences, for R1 800 a month.

The service is hosted in South Africa, says Van der Walt, which makes for lower costs as well as higher quality. “With a service like Skype, you're using public Internet resources that are shared with millions of other people. Your call is also being routed via overseas servers, which means a long roundtrip that further degrades quality. It's also less secure. With Eyeris Mobile, you get the best of both worlds: boardroom quality and security, at local bandwidth costs, anywhere in South Africa.”