Polycom has made two major announcements. In the first, the company said that it had teamed with leading service providers from around the world to enable broader visual communications adoption by enabling interoperability and global business-to-business (B2B) connectivity for telepresence and video conferencing. The Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC) has, said Polycom, been formed to enable businesses to connect virtually anywhere.
The OVCC organisation includes founding members Airtel, AT&T, BCS Global, BT Conferencing, Cable&Wireless Worldwide, Global Crossing, Glowpoint, iFormata Communications, Masergy, Orange Business Services, PCCW Global, Telefonica, Telstra, and Verizon, and will be extended to include additional service providers in the future.
“The growth and potential business and user value of telepresence has historically been stifled by interoperability and connectivity challenges,” said Andrew Miller, CE of Polycom (pictured). “Today, Polycom and OVCC are rewriting the rules. This groundbreaking global consortium is transforming the connectivity model with a world-class global exchange that, over time, removes the barriers to ubiquity, thus further enabling our UC Everywhere vision.”
In the second announcement, Polycom revealed that it had entered into a definitive agreement under which Polycom will acquire the assets of HP’s Visual Collaboration business, including the Halo Products and Managed Services business.
In conjunction with this acquisition, HP and Polycom have agreed to establish a strategic relationship in which Polycom will serve as an exclusive partner to HP for telepresence and certain video UC solutions, including both resale and internal HP deployments. The two companies have also agreed to make available Polycom’s video applications for HP’s WebOS platform.
www.polycom.com
