posted 17 September 2004 03:58 AM            

It will certainly beneficial for mixed communication environment of Polycom and Microsoft endpoints. I will not doubt about it. I totally agree.

But Looking at this alliance like others, I do not see much benefits on the part of Polycom as far as looking at what is agreed to do. I read some articles available on the Internet, and one report says that Polycom wants to get more customers for their conferencing products as the result of this alliance as comment from Polycom. I assume that this is not their real intention that is behind their movements.

Also, I do not think that Polycom is trying to leverage Microsoft's brand name for themselves as they are already well-known.

My bold assumption is that Polycom's long term strategy as going concern is to become another Nortel, Alcatel, Avaya, etc.. not just relying on conferencing business model but also by leveraging the conferencing prowess, they may want to expand their business sphere into areas that deal with all kinds of collaborative communications offered by the incumbent heavyweights.

Polycom started their business from audio conferencing and moved onto video that is one of their pillar businesses generating important revenue. But now the market circumstances have changed and they call themselves as the leading provider of Unified Collaborative Communications to adjust themselves to the changing circumstances.

In order for Polycom to become as I mentioned, they need to work with all these incumbent heavyweights that they are seeing as the future figure of Polycom.

So not only with Microsoft but also all other partnerships, Polycom's intention may be around that to become the future heavyweighs of across the board collaborative communnications centering on IP and other viable networks.

Again, partnerships with Microsoft, Cisco, Avaya, Nortel etc.. will certainly benefit end users who have relevant needs, but I think that is not all of what is happening here and there and behind. What are forces at work behind all of these?

Polycom like other companies is trying to find a way to survive in the always changing uncharted future of business. What does Polycom want to be in the future?

What does "Poly" mean? I just looked up my English dictionary and found that it means "many". So Poly-com may mean "many-communications" or various ways of communications or in contemporary IP era term, ubiquitous collaborative communications.

Maybe Brian Hinman already envisioned the future figure of Polycom when he found the company in early 1990s.