By Mariette Johnson Wharton, VP of Marketing
Those of us in the video conferencing industry have been anticipating a Polycom reaction to Cisco’s fall 2009 announcement of its acquisition of Tandberg, the leading video conferencing equipment supplier. Today we await no longer.
Tensions have been on the rise with the severance of the Cisco-HP reseller arrangement, the Tandberg acquisition and Cisco’s increasingly aggressively focus on telepresence (the fastest-growing business unit in the firm’s history). What was Polycom to do? Polycom today announced that it’s teaming up with HP to drive interoperability of its video conferencing and telepresence systems with HP Halo telepresence. Under the arrangement, Polycom’s video and voice solutions for unified communications will be sold and delivered through HP’s Unified Communications and Collaboration Services portfolio.