Polycom and Avaya team to integrate UC and video

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 11 March 2010 13:00

IT Industry - Strategy

Avaya and Polycom are to integrate technologies in the latest of a string of relationships announced by Polycom following the acquisition of Tandberg by Cisco.

Avaya and Polycom will jointly develop and market integrated, end-to-end unified communications systems that use the Avaya Aura SIP-based platform and the Polycom Open Collaboration Network strategy.

They claim that the joint solutions will provide Polycom's full range of voice and video systems integrated with Avaya Aura delivering real-time collaboration to customers. "Avaya Aura will enable companies to administer, schedule and manage the joint solutions in a single, consistent manner, and control bandwidth to support a superior user experience and optimal deployment of network resources," they said.

"The expanded partnership supports Avaya Aura as a fundamental control point for managing and delivering communications across organizations."

The Avaya Aura platform is claimed to "simplify existing voice and video communications architectures, including the ability to integrate communications across multi-vendor networks, to deliver business communications with more capabilities, fewer costs and less complexity."

Avaya was strongly tipped to be planning to acquire Polycom last year, but it is generally believed that the plan was abandoned after Avaya spent $US0.9b (almost double its initial offer) on Nortel's enterprise telephony business.

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