Siemens and Polycom team up on UC

Siemens and Polycom believe videoconferencing will take off in 2010

Businesses will be able to benefit from an integrated unified communications (UC) platform from Siemens Enterprise Communications (SEN) and Polycom after a deal announced today.

The partnership will see Polycom's telepresence and high-definition videoconferencing products integrated with SEN's OpenScape UC platform as part of a global resale agreement.

SEN will also offer Polycom's range of visual communication solutions, including telepresence, videoconferencing and desktop video collaboration applications.

Polycom's visual communication solutions supported on SEN's OpenScape platform to help customers improve collaboration efforts and reduce conferencing costs and the need for employee travel, the firm said.

Aaron Payne, area sales vice president for the UK and Ireland at Polycom, explained that the partnership had been brought about in part to counter the recent merger of Cisco and Tandberg.

"We first spoke with SEN about four months ago and discussed the way we could come together to offer both companies' UC platforms as part of an open collaboration to offer the best combination of our products to the market," he said.

Payne argued that videoconferencing is now a growing market in the UC space, and that it is important to offer these capabilities for new and existing customers as part of a simple and effective infrastructure.

"As both companies work with open standards to provide seamless integration of technologies, we are able to provide existing customers with the ability to upgrade without the need to rip and replace any existing infrastructure, while new customers have a quick and easy installation processes," he added.