Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Brainshark, Brightcove link up to get businesses making video

By Galen Moore

Brainshark and Brightcove are expected to announce today they are linking up their software products in an effort to make it easier for companies to create and publish video.

With about 170 employees, Waltham-based Brainshark Inc. makes software that lets users create video out of a slide deck plus their own narration, using Microsoft PowerPoint software and the telephone – something like an asynchronous WebEx videoconference.
 
That could help Brightcove get enterprises to use more video, officials said. The Cambridge company established itself as an early leader making software that lets major publishers catalogue their video libraries and present them online. The latest growth stage for Brightcove Inc. – which reportedly is planning an IPO this year – is into the enterprise, selling content publishing software for internal and external video.

That’s a tough proposition, and Brainshark isn’t the only one trying to solve it. KnowledgeVision Inc. launched last February with a competing offering, spun out of a Boston-area video studio and raised $2 million from GrandBanks Capital of Wellesley.

That’s a validation, said Brainshark CEO Joe Gustafson. “If you look back to the web conferencing market, when that market got really going, there were a number of competitors,” he said. “You need competition to get a market going.”

Meanwhile, Brainshark is doing fine on its own. The company closed its last round of venture capital financing at $23 million, total, in 2005, and is now profitable, Gustafson said. It plans to hire about 50 more people in 2011. Brainshark has 1,500 enterprise customers, each paying $50,000 a year on average for the service, and a smaller slice of revenue coming from smaller businesses that pay by the drink. The company saw 34 percent top-line growth in 2010, he said.

“The natural expansion path for Brightcove was not just high-end marketing oriented, but what about internal or sales training or other kinds of inside and outside video communication needs?” Gustafson said. “What we have that’s unique is the ability for any businessperson to rapidly create multimedia content.”

 

Editor's note: An earlier online version of this story mischaracterized the dollar value of Brainshark’s enterprise contracts. $50,000 is the average value, not the minimum.