Polycom

Is Cisco backing out of Tandberg deal?

Bloomberg is reporting that Cisco might walk away from its agreement to buy Tandberg. As we mentioned two weeks ago, A large group of shareholders have balked at the $3 billion offer Cisco and Tandberg’s executives and boards of directors agreed upon. Cisco’s Tandberg deal is contingent on it being able to acquire 90% of the company’s stock. Twenty-one shareholders who own 24% of the company say Cisco’s offer is too low.

Bloomberg is citing a “person familiar with the transaction” as the anonymous source for its report.  Financial analyst Martin Hoff at Arctic Securities ASA told Bloomberg that Cisco probably won’t just walk away. Instead, the anonymous claim that Cisco is contemplating a pullout from the deal is probably just a scare tactic. “It’s probably smart of them to send some signals to scare the shareholders into accepting the offer,” he told Bloomberg.

If Cisco does close the Tandberg deal, it will expand its enterprise video strategy from its high-end telepresence products to a full suite of desktop and room-based video systems, multipoint control units and video management software. Combined with Cisco’s existing lines of telephony products and Cisco will be competing directly with Tandberg’s chief rival Polycom on all fronts. If that happens, enterprises can expect other major communications vendors like Avaya and Microsoft to become heavily aligned with Polycom.

Tandberg telepresence now interoperates with Polycom telepresence

Tandberg announced this morning that its telepresence technology is now interoperable with the telepresence technology of its rival Polycom. The interoperability is delivered as a software upgrade to the Tandberg Telepresence Server.

Tandberg’s server already enables interoperability with non-telepresence Tandberg video endpoints and with Microsoft Office Communications Server. However, until now, the vast majority of immersive telepresence systems on the market have been extremely proprietary. Telepresence systems are generally unable to maintain the immersive, multi-screen, high-definition experience they are known for when a session is transmitted across vendors. In many cases telepesence systems from different vendors can’t communciate with each other at all.

The new interoperability from Tandberg claims to deliver that telepresence quality to sessions between Tandberg and Polycom products. This ineroperability will be especially important to inter-enterprise communications, enabling Tandberg customers to communicate and collaborate with Polycom customers.

There is no word on whether Tandberg will add interoperability with its other major telepresence rival, Cisco, but in this announcement the company said it will “continue to build on its successes by working to develop immersive interoperability with additional telepresence systems – both proprietary and standards-based.”

The Polycom VVX 1500 business media phone at VoiceCon

I shot this video at VoiceCon Orlando last week. Tim Yankey, director of product marketing for Polycom, is doing a demo of the VWX 1500, which the vendor describes as a “business media phone.” At a list price of $1099, this phone is meant to sit on the desks of high level executives. It has high quality video and touchscreen capabilities. And Polycom is touting the openness of the platform, encouraging third-party software developers to build light-weight business apps to run on the phone. Polycom doesn’t claim this phone will replace the PC on the desk. Instead it claims the phone will be a compliment to the PC. The phone is certainly slick, but I wonder if it’s worth the money. Couldn’t you get a lot of the same functionality from a softphone? I guess a CEO might want something like this on his or her desk, but broad deployment of such an expensive phone might be hard to justify.

Please forgive the sideways angle at the beginning of this video. I’ve been using my iPhone too much. I’m used to a camera that’s integrated into an accelerometer.

Microsoft decides it shouldn’t be in the video conference phone business

When Microsoft introduced its Roundtable phone 2007, it was pretty clear to me that they had a cool device on their hands. The phone has a ring of video cameras on a small turret. It is meant ti sit in a conference room, where it offers a 360-degree view of meeting participants. The phone uses directional technology to cut in real-time to whoever is speaking in a meeting.

I shot this demo of the phone at the Microsoft booth at VoiceCon Orlando 2008.

The only aspect of the Roundtable phone that troubled me was Microsoft.  It’s a software company, not a hardware company. It does Windows and lets others build the PCs. It does Windows Mobile and lets others do the smartphone. And when Microsoft does venture into hardware, it tends to do it in the consumer market, and with mixed results (see Zune, XBox).  So it wasn’t clear to me why Microsoft was trying to get into this business.

Granted, the Roundtable integrates with Office Communications Server, but every phone equipment vendor under the sun is looking to integrate with OCS these days. Walk the exhibitor’s hall at this year’s VoiceCon and see that for yourself.

Apparently Microsoft agrees that it’s not the ideal vendor for a product like Roundtable. It announced at VoiceCon this week that it is transferring the Roundtable phone to Polycom, which will become the sole distributor of the device. Polycom is re-branding Roundtable as the CX5000, which integrates it into Polycom’s existing line of conference phone products. Microsoft will continue to manufacture the device, but as far as I can tell, this phone is now going to market as a Polycom product. Microsoft will continue to support customers who bought the device through it, but all subsequent support will be provided by Polycom.

According to Tim Yankey, director of voice product marketing at Polycom, said Microsoft will stop selling Roundtable on April 13 and hand over sales, marketing and distribution to Polycom. The sales price under Polycom will be $4300.

Although Microsoft will continue to manufacture the device, Yankey told me that Polycom has the right to make changes and additions to the phone in the future.

Polycom also announced at VoiceCon that it will begin offering 1080p and 720p resolution in its high definition telepresence systems. This is the broadcast quality video that competitors such as Tandberg and Cisco already offer in their telepresence systems.