Leading Unified Communications Vendors Line Up with Polycom

BroadSoft, IBM and Siemens Enterprise Communications Group Partnerships Support Polycom Open Collaboration Network Initiative

01 Feb 2010 : Polycom®, Inc. [Nasdaq: PLCM], the leader in telepresence, video and voice communications solutions, continues to expand its partnerships with the leaders in network infrastructure and Unified Communications (UC), announcing new solutions and deepened relationships with BroadSoft®, IBM, and Siemens Enterprise Communication Group. Polycom’s integration efforts with these leading platform providers support Polycom’s Open Collaboration Network strategy for delivering open and interoperable conferencing and collaboration solutions that provide customers with greater flexibility and investment protection within their UC environments.

By working with the leading Unified Communications platform providers, Polycom is able to deliver its productivity-enhancing and cost-saving telepresence, video and voice collaboration products as an integrated part of core UC environments – making the technologies easily accessible to end users in their daily workflows, and easy for IT organisations to deploy and manage. Importantly, Polycom's Open Collaboration Network strategy avoids the need for organisations to 'rip-and-replace' existing IT investments, in order to achieve significant competitive advantage from telepresence, video and voice collaboration solutions.

"Polycom is the leading independent vendor of voice, video and HD telepresence solutions and services that enable dispersed work teams to easily meet using whatever Unified Communications device they choose," said Hansjoerg Wagner, Vice President and Managing Director for Polycom Asia Pacific. "By enabling people to communicate anywhere, anytime, Polycom's solutions maximise team productivity and accelerate decision-making – helping Polycom customers to achieve a significant competitive advantage."

Mr. Wagner added, "Polycom is the partner of choice for leading Unified Communications (UC) and networking solutions providers because Polycom offers an open, platform-agnostic approach to collaboration. Polycom sees that continuing to strengthen our relationships with these leading players in the Unified Communications ecosystem will help to drive mainstream video adoption within two to three years."

According to an independent report from Forrester Research Inc., the market for Unified Communications within enterprises in North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific is forecast to reach US$14.5 billion in 2015. In its February 2009 report, "Market Overview: Sizing Unified Communications," Forrester also predicts "that companies will deploy enhanced UC capabilities to about 60 per cent of employees in functions that will benefit most from embedding communications features like wireless and video directly into their business applications."

BroadSoft
BroadSoft, the worldwide leader of VoIP application software, and Polycom are expanding their partnership to introduce BroadSoft V2Connect, a fully integrated voice and video solution delivered over one common infrastructure. BroadSoft V2Connect enables cloud providers to offer UC as a hosted service.

For users, BroadSoft V2Connect is the seamless delivery of multi-party conferencing for voice, video and telepresence, which results in a reduction in travel costs, improved efficiency and more effective teleworking. With BroadSoft V2Connect, a user can take a call from a mobile, transfer to a video call and then escalate it to a multi-party conference call.

IBM
Customers deploying IBM Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC²) environments will benefit from enhanced integration of Polycom voice and visual communication solutions with Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. The combined solution is designed to give users "one-click" access to on-demand voice and video collaboration tools from within Lotus software applications that can enhance teamwork, reduce costs, and help accelerate enterprise decision making among colleagues, customers and business partners.

The Polycom solution will allow users to "Click-to-Call" and "Click-to-Conference" telepresence, video, voice and unified (combined voice and video) conferencing from presence-enabled contacts within IBM Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes. In addition, Lotus Sametime Web conferencing users will be able to launch Instant Meetings with voice and video conferences, or include a voice or video conference as part of scheduled web conference.

This announcement expands existing integration that Polycom offers with IBM UC² and will complement the existing services offering between Polycom and IBM Global Technology Services to deliver scalable, security-enriched and highly-available unified communications solutions to enterprise clients around the globe.

Siemens Enterprise Communications Group
Siemens Enterprise Communications Group (SEN Group) and Polycom have announced a strategic alliance and global resale agreement that will enable customers to leverage the productivity and cost-saving benefits of Polycom telepresence, high definition (HD) video conferencing solutions and desktop video collaboration applications through seamless integration with the OpenScape UC environment. By adopting a state-of-the-art UC environment, organisations can take advantage of innovative video solutions from Polycom, and increase collaboration and customer responsiveness while reducing conferencing costs and the need for employee travel.

Under the global resale agreement, SEN Group will offer Polycom's portfolio of visual communication solutions, including award-winning personal, room and immersive telepresence solutions, video conferencing systems, and desktop video collaboration applications.

About the Polycom Open Collaboration Network
Polycom's Open Collaboration Network strategy provides an open and interoperable collaboration solution that gives customers greater flexibility and investment protection for their UC environment. By working with leading Unified Communications platform providers, Polycom is able to deliver its productivity-enhancing and cost-saving telepresence, video and voice collaboration products as an integrated part of core Unified Communications environments, making the technologies easily accessible as part of the everyday workflow within a comprehensive solution that is easy to deploy and manage.

About Polycom
Polycom, Inc. (Nasdaq: PLCM) is the global leader in telepresence, video, and voice solutions and a visionary in communications that empower people to connect and collaborate everywhere. Visit www.polycom.asia for more information and follow us on Twitter @AllAboutPolycom.

© 2010 Polycom, Inc. All rights reserved. POLYCOM®, the Polycom "Triangles" logo and the names and marks associated with Polycom's products are trademarks and/or service marks of Polycom, Inc. and are registered and/or common law marks in the United States and various other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Polycom reserves the right to modify future product plans at any time. Products and/or related specifications referenced in this press release are not guaranteed, and will be delivered on a when and if available basis

Contacts

• Naomi Jackson
  Polycom, Inc.
  Tel: +61 416 541 544
  naomi.jackson@polycom.com