How will the Cisco/Tandberg purchase affect Polycom?

With Cisco Systems' purchase of video conferencing equipment manufacture Tandberg for $3 billion last week, the industry is wondering what it all means for competitor Polycom. As Richard Martin of Phone+ states [1], the merger is "potentially existential for Polycom, which now faces a combined competitor" in the video conferencing space. What it really means to Polycom is less competitors and perhaps more cooperation among the rest of the industry.

In an interview, Joan Vandermate, Vice President of Marketing from the Video Solutions Group at Polycom, explained to FierceVoIP what the merger meant to Polycom. After acknowledging that the purchase was a good sign for the video communications industry as a whole--signalling the arrival of the technology into the mainstream--Vandermate stated the Tandberg purchase gives Polycom a chance "to consolidate efforts against a single competitor" where once they were being challenged on different fronts.

As far as all this talk about Polycom now facing a monolithic competitor, Vandermate believes her company is "very well positioned... to go to the market and to customers, reseller partners and strategic alliance partners and tell them that [Polycom is] the vendor of choice, the vendor of openness, the vendor that will not lock you into a single solution." Cisco may now be a one-stop-shop for their customers offering not only servers and networking equipment but also all manner of communications technology, but as Vandermate states: "for a lot of customers it's scary. A lot of customers do not want any single vendor to have that much leverage and that much control."

On No Jitter Zeus Kerravala of Yankee group [2] made an interesting point on the single vendor approach stating, "From an industry perspective, the move is somewhat counter to where the rest of the vendors are going. We've seen many companies align themselves with one another forming partnerships to deliver broad based, industry standards based solutions." As a response to Cisco's interoperability-through-acquisition play, Polycom is using the announcement as a chance to reach out to other vendors to increase the interworking of their technologies. "We would love to see a very strong multi-vendor alliance to push standards interoperability and push the idea of a unified communications ecosystem instead of unified communications from 'Vendor X'" stated Vandermate.

For more:
- read Zeus Kerravala's article on No Jitter [2]
- read Richard Martin on Phone+ [1]
- also check out our previous article on the purchase [3]