Polycom takes another step to drive video-conferencing interoperability

Ask anyone in the videoconferencing industry what the single biggest hurdle to its adoption is and you'll likely get the same answer: interoperability.

That's no real surprise, but the sudden push by vendors to make their product play nice with everybody else is.

The latest convert to the interoperability bandwagon is, not surprisingly, Polycom (Nasdaq: PLCM). Polycom was a founding member of the Open Visual Communications Consortium (OVCC), an association of industry players--including companies like AT&T (NYSE: T), BCS Global, Bharti Airtel, BT Conferencing, Dialogic, Orange Business Services, Teliris, Telstra and Verizon (NYSE: VZ)--working to bring standards to the videoconferencing industry.

This week the company announced a new software update that allows customers using Polycom and other standards-based video collaboration solutions to join calls with non-standard Cisco TelePresence Systems, and vice-versa. The latest RealPresence Platform software update, released Wednesday, also further extends interoperability across Microsoft and IBM UC environments.

"This is a great win for anyone using video collaboration," said Sudhakar Ramakrishna, executive vice president and general manager of UC solutions and chief development officer at Polycom. "Our support for TIP is freeing users of non-standard Cisco telepresence by allowing them to connect to millions of other standards-based video systems that are deployed worldwide."

The company said the move "further establishes Polycom as the leader of open standards and interoperability and provides investment protection for our customers."  

Gartner VP and analyst Mark Fabbi agrees. "Enterprises need to ensure they use open and interoperable protocols between network building blocks to ensure that they can achieve a high degree of functionality while preserving or migrating their existing investments," he said, adding that by leveraging multi-vendor networks, enterprises can improve network capabilities while significantly reducing costs and simplifying network complexity.

The latest Polycom software releases include full native TIP support for video calls, and extended support for H.323 and SIP networks, which allow organizations to access shared UC environments such as IBM Sametime and Microsoft Lync, even if participants are using legacy systems.

The software update eliminates the need for gateways and licenses, trimming costs and making it less complex, allows organizations to simply dial into a videoconference virtual meeting room.

Increasingly, companies are discovering that enterprise customers, and their little brothers, SMBs, are eager to dive into the videoconferencing pool, but they want to know what the bottom line is, and to make sure that their investment will be as flexible and as cutting edge a year from now as it is today.

Polycom and it's fellow OVCC members are trying to future proof their technology, and that's going to help them take a bigger share of the market.--Jim