• by Gavin O'Malley  @mp_gavin, January 4, 2011

Videoconferencing startup Vidyo on Monday named former Microsoft exec Ashish Gupta as its new chief marketing officer and SVP of corporate development. Despite various marketing efforts portraying a futuristic vision of visual communication, videoconferencing has so far failed to achieve broad adoption in any sector.

According to Gupta, however, Vidyo is changing all that by taking on the "age old problem of proprietary and expensive legacy video conferencing systems that have resulted in islands of collaboration within enterprises.

"Vidyo's architecture has a several-year technology lead over legacy systems, is available today, and is being used by marquee customers and partners," he added.

Vidyo purports to offer "democratized" video collaboration by letting customers use off-the-shelf laptops, desktops and mobile devices to operate at reasonable price points. Put another way, Vidyo is effectively trying to bridge the gap between million-dollar teleconferencing services offered by Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, and low-quality PC-based services like Skype.

This past summer, HP announced a deal under which it planned to bundle Vidyo software on business PCs so users could make video calls from their desks.

HP also plans to adapt its own high-end telepresence system, dubbed Halo, to work with Vidyo's technology so corporate buyers can use them without million-dollar network upgrades.

As a senior director at Microsoft, Ashish helped launch Microsoft's Lync solution as the leader of the Business Development and Strategy team for the Microsoft Office Division's Unified Communications Group.

During his tenure at Microsoft, Ashish also led the Channel Sales and Marketing team for the Real Time Communications group, led and managed Microsoft Office and Unified Communications and Collaboration strategic alliances, and co-led various other initiatives including the development of Microsoft's Mobile Worker, Contact Center and Hosted Unified Communications offerings.

Prior to Microsoft, Ashish was VP of product and solutions at Alcatel/ Genesys Telecommunications and VP of marketing and business development at Telera Inc.

As a management consultant for Braxton/Deloitte Consulting, he advised several large networking, hardware and telecommunications clients on new growth and market development initiatives. He also held product marketing, product management and channels positions at HP, Covad and OnFiber.