Polycom Puts It TogetherPolycom Puts It Together

I had a chance to sit down with three Polycom execs at VoiceCon, and they laid out a portfolio of products and new announcements that buttresses the company's standing as the leading vendor-independent supplier of IP endpoints using all relevant media and interfaces--voice and video, wireline and wireless.

I had a chance to sit down with three Polycom execs at VoiceCon, and they laid out a portfolio of products and new announcements that buttresses the company's standing as the leading vendor-independent supplier of IP endpoints using all relevant media and interfaces--voice and video, wireline and wireless.First up, Ben Guderian, the industry veteran and all-around great guy, who came to Polycom with the SpectraLink acquisition, described a new WiFi phone, the SpectraLink 8002 Wireless Telephone (SpectraLink lives on as the family name for Polycom's wireless handsets).

Ben described the 8002 as an "entry-level" product, a description that applies mainly because the phone uses a low-bandwidth 802.11b radio (that's the 11 Mbps standard, as opposed to the 802.11a's 54 Mbps capacity). Incorporating just .11b was a deliberate decision, made to ensure that the phone is compatible with the installed base at SMBs, much of which is still only .11b-compatible, according to Ben. The enterprise aspect is that the phone features 802.11 WPA/WPA2 security, the state of the art, as well as 802.11e WiFi Multimedia (WMM) QOS.

Ben has pointed out before that the wireless office, and voice over WiFi, is likely to occur in the SMB space long before it hits the large enterprise (if that ever happens at all). That's because a small business is more likely to be able to blanket its entire facility with WiFi coverage via just a handful of APs. Also, the demands of large enterprises will likely always require cable pulls, whereas the small business, like most homes today, may find it's able to network all its users via WiFi, especially as 100-Mbps 802.11n works its way into the network.

The phone lists at $349, which Ben said puts it significantly below other WiFi sets.

After hearing from Ben, I spoke with Jim Kruger, who discussed a suite of phone-based "productivity applications" that Polycom announced at VoiceCon. These applications are:

1. Visual Conference Management--An app that can manage four-party conference calls via a visual interface on the phone display.

2. Local Call Recording--Users can insert a memory stick into a phone's USB port, and a user interface pops up on the display that controls the recording of calls (e.g., stop/start/pause) onto the USB stick.

3. Corporate Directory Access--This LDAP-based application lets the phone user tie into the corporate directory, to supplement the user-controlled personal directory on the phone.

4. Voice Quality Monitoring--Polycom has OEMed Telchemy's phone-based agent software, which sits on the phone and reports call quality metrics in real time. Jim Kruger said this will most likely be used mainly by service providers offering hosted IP telephony and needing to monitor their service quality.

5. Third-Party Call Control--This application uses uaCSTA, a standards-based interface that lets the phone be controlled via a PC-based client. According to Jim, Microsoft Office Communications Server and Sylantro's system support uaCSTA.

Finally, I spoke with Stefan Karapetkov, Emerging Technologies Director, about Polycom's video announcement, which centered on expanded integration with Microsoft OCS. Polycom will use SIP to integrate all Polycom components with OCS, allowing them to register, authenticate and share presence information with OCS. Stefan emphasized this latter point, saying, "If you don't support presence, it's not really Unified Communications."

Polycom also licensed Microsoft's Real-Time Audio and Real-Time Video codecs, which allow Polycom endpoints to run as native endpoints on an OCS system, without calls needing to go through the Microsoft OCS Mediation Server.

TechWeb TV has interviews with Polycom about the announcements:

And, for Mark Roberts, "Greensleeves:"