Polycom announced the close of its acquisition of HP’s
Visual Collaboration business, and the agreement under 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 acquisition and agreement doubles Polycom’s immersive
telepresence marketshare and further strengthens Polycom’s leadership in the UC
video market, which is growing as businesses of all sizes around the world are
using video collaboration as a strategic and cost-effective way to improve
productivity and create high-performance workplaces.
In addition to HP, Polycom works with a large and diverse
channel community representing multiple routes to market, including:
distribution partners, value added resellers, service providers and systems
integrators. Polycom’s uncompromising commitment to open standards and 100
percent channel orientation remains unchanged.
The two companies also recently agreed to make Polycom’s
enterprise-grade video applications available for HP’s webOS platform, in
keeping with Polycom’s commitment to enable mobile UC as a key element in its
UC Everywhere vision.
“Polycom is excited to close this acquisition and we
welcome Halo customers to Polycom. We’re looking forward to our expanded
strategic relationship with HP, to offer customers an end-to-end UC solution
with an unparalleled user experience, open standards-based interoperability,
the industry’s best TCO, investment protection through backwards- and
forwards-compatibility, and ease of deployment,” said Andrew Miller,
Polycom president and CEO.
HP has enormous global reach, and our broadened
relationship with the company is another important step in meeting Polycom’s
commitment to bring the most advanced and innovative UC solutions to market –
from mobile video applications and UC software to room and immersive
telepresence solutions.
In the rapidly growing UC and telepresence markets,
Polycom has emerged as a leader and continues to gain significant marketshare
in both video endpoint solutions and video infrastructure.
In the latest Wainhouse Research quarterly report on
video conferencing and telepresence, “Wainhouse Spotcheck:
Videoconferencing Q1 2011,” Polycom gained nine points vs. the previous
quarter and extended its leadership in video endpoint unit shipments to 45
percent market share in Q1 2011.
Polycom also grew three points
sequentially in video infrastructure revenue (Polycom offers the UC Intelligent
Core platform), as the overall video infrastructure market grew at 24 percent
year-over-year.
The acquisition strengthens Polycom’s leadership position
in the UC and telepresence markets by bringing HP’s installed base of visual
collaboration products and technology together with Polycom’s customer base the
industry’s largest at about 1 million video systems.
The acquisition includes the assets of HP’s Visual
Collaboration business, including the Halo Products and Managed Services
business. Polycom picks up customer sites with many Global 500 customers across
36 countries.
For current Halo and Halo Video Exchange Network (HEVN)
customers, Polycom will deliver uninterrupted services and support providing
the same quality of experience and service level agreements these customers have
enjoyed and expect.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
