Shortly after Cisco brought Tandberg into the fold, Logitech acquired LifeSize, and earlier this month, Radvision announced plans to acquire Aethra.
 
Incumbent Polycom quickly mobilized with a counteroffensive play, hyper-focusing on a strategy to retain their current market share and pull customers away from the monolithic Cisco. Forging new partnerships, cultivating deep alliances with existing partners and an aggressive focus on product development is Polycom’s core strategy.

Betting that enterprises are most likely to deploy telepresence as a service over investing in costly in-house solutions, Polycom recently teamed with Juniper Networks to provide optimized platforms for service providers.

In January, Polycom revealed a global reseller agreement with Siemens that will enable customers to leverage the productivity and cost-saving benefits of Polycom telepresence, high-definition (HD) video conferencing solutions and desktop video collaboration applications through seamless integration with the OpenScape UC environment.

Polycom refined their partnership with IBM by expanding Polycom’s integrated voice and visual communication solutions for customers deploying IBM Unified Communication and Collaboration (UC2) environments with support for Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes.

On Feb. 16, Polycom announced a solution to substantially reduce network bandwidth cost savings for customers. By providing support for a standards-based video compression technology, H.264 High Profile, the company says bandwidth requirements for high-definition (HD) telepresence and standard definition (SD) video conferencing can be reduced by as much as 50%. Support for H.264 High Profile on Polycom HDX room and personal telepresence systems is slated for April.

Polycom also announced an expanded telepresence product portfolio, Polycom HDX 6000 View, which is a full-featured HD room telepresence system with a price point just under $5,000. For companies looking for room-based, 1080p video resolution, check out the Polycom HDX 9000 which will also be available in April. Starting list price is $24,999.

When we reported on the Cisco-Tandberg deal in October, Ira Weinstein, senior analyst with Wainhouse Research, told us that the acquisition would force other unified communications and telephony vendors to embrace Polycom in an effort to differentiate their own enterprise video strategies.

Siemens Enterprise Communications made its move this month, announcing a new videoconferencing alliance with Polycom. As Mike Vizard at CTOEdge pointed out, Tandberg had been Siemens’ go-to partner on video solutions prior to the Cisco-Tandberg deal. Siemens will continue to support Tandberg products with its OpenScape UC products, but Polycom is now its preferred partner.

Yesterday, Polycom picked up an infrastructure partner, too, when it announced a deal with Juniper Networks. In mid-2010, the two companies will release updates to their products that will allow service providers to optimize their networks for Polycom videoconferencing products.

Stacey Higginbotham over at GigaOM says that Juniper’s partnership with Polycom won’t work.

I’m not sure that Juniper and Polycom are an ideal match, mostly because tying the product to the networking gear is a strategy that ultimately follows along with Cisco’s aims. As a smaller rival to Cisco, Juniper can’t win by playing by the same rules as the larger company — it needs to break them.

Regardless of whether Juniper and Polycom’s new alliance works, it’s clear that Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg has Cisco’s rivals in multiple markets looking to work with Polycom.  Not only are other UC and telephony vendors embracing Polycom. Rival network infrastructure vendors are cuddling up to them as well.  Competition in the videoconferencing market is alive and well.