Microsoft Approves of Vividon's Appliance

Last week Microsoft announced that Vividon's Streaming Delivery Accelerator (SDA) has passed a battery of over 550 tests designed to determine whether or not a product is suitable for Windows Media streaming in terms of quality and compatibility.

Essentially, this means that customers who are considering Vividon's delivery appliances now know that Microsoft has verified Vividon's interoperability with Microsoft Windows Media origin servers and clients.

The over 550 tests designed by Microsoft covered such areas as multiple protocol scenarios, multiple bit rate streams, authentication, server logging and many others.

Vividon (www.vividon.com) is the first company to receive such a blessing from Microsoft, and the accomplishment is particularly striking considering that Vividon has built its own operating system and ported the Windows Media capability to that platform. Officially, Windows Media is only available on the Windows NT/2000 operating system, although another appliance company, StarBak, announced Windows Media compatibility with its embedded Linux operating system. Only Vividon, however, went through certification.

"We are very pleased to receive this stamp of approval from Microsoft," said David Ellenberger, Vividon president and CEO.

Microsoft's interest in testing and verifying stream caching and delivery appliances gives a boost to the market segment, which has seen a lot of new entrants lately due to the growth of the enterprise streaming space.

There is a lot of competition for the caching and delivery appliance market. Competitors include CacheFlow, StarBak, Network Appliance, Infolibria, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, F5, 3Com, and others.

Vividon was founded by two MIT Ph.D. candidates in 1998, who apparently felt their work with advanced operating systems was better utilized in the marketplace than in a research laboratory.