Starbak acquires Vividon

Starbak Communications is giving itself a housewarming gift for its impending move to the Boston area: fellow streaming-media company Vividon of Sudbury, Mass.

Since announcing two months ago that it is moving its headquarters from Columbus, Ohio, to the Boston suburbs, Starbak, which makes appliances for streaming and recording videoconference calls, has been in talks with Vividon, a company that came out of DARPA-funded research at MIT. The two decided they’re a good fit for each other and worked out acquisition terms over the past six weeks, says Karen Gurwitz, vice president of marketing at Starbak.

Vividon makes high-end servers designed to handle lots of media streams simultaneously. The company’s SDA-2000 delivered 4,500 concurrent streams of 56K bit/sec each without dropping a packet in a recent Network World test. Starbak’s appliances expand the reach videoconference calls by allowing viewers to hear and see the participants of a call via streaming media.

Starbak and Vividon are privately held and terms of the deal were not disclosed. Vividon gets venture funding from Venrock Associates, Atlas Venture, Carlyle Venture Partners and Jim Dow, a private investor. Both companies will relocate to offices in Waltham, Mass., sometime in February. Gurwitz says both the management and technical teams will be merged with no reduction in staff.