Polycom and Juniper team to boost networked video

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 26 January 2010 02:54

Business IT - Technology

Polycom has forged a global alliance with Juniper Networks to improve the delivery of videoconferencing over carrier and enterprise networks, hot on the heels of its global strategic alliance with Siemens Enterprise Comms.

According to their joint announcement, the alliance is "focused on improving the reliability, cost-effectiveness and quality of the customer experience for telepresence and videoconferencing services...[using] dynamic signalling between the Juniper network resource control platform and the Polycom video call control system."

They will deliver a joint solution comprising network infrastructure systems from Juniper with telepresence and videoconferencing systems from Polycom. Specifically, it includes the Junos Space network application platform and its subscriber suite that includes policy and identity services, the MX Series 3D universal edge routers, and SRX Series services gateways with integrated routing and security for streamlined enterprise connectivity and the Polycom Distributed Media Application (DMA) that centralises call control and provides further failover redundancy.

According to their joint announcement, "The combination of the Junos Space network resource orchestration, real-time interactions between its policy and identity services, and the Junos operating system, with the Polycom DMA call control server enables a dynamic coordinated allocation of video and network resources, driven by user video session needs.

"This allows service providers to more accurately control and deliver video quality of service on a converged network shared with other applications. By maximising their network capabilities and value, carriers can scale their networks more cost-effectively and realise higher margins for services."

This is the second significant alliance struck by Polycom since its main rival, Tandberg, succumbed to a takeover offer from Cisco. Just days ago Polycom announced a global alliance with Siemens Enterprise Communications to integrate its technology with the OpenScape unified comms products.

The new alliance with Juniper will go some way to enabling Polycom to enjoy important synergies between networking and videoconferencing technologies now available to Tandberg as part of Cisco. At the same time it will enable Cisco's smaller and much more specialised networking rival Juniper to counter a combined Cisco Tandberg.

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