What’s Behind All the Video Conferencing Partnerships?

The recent news of Polycom’s (Nasdaq: PLCM) partnership with Juniper (NYSE: JNPR)—which GigaOm suggests
is in response to Cisco’s acquisition of Tandberg—got me thinking of
the playing together in the sandbox analogy. Making room for everyone
to play well in the same space is more important than ever with the
rapid advancements in communications technologies. It’s all about
making sure that customers – businesses and consumers – have access to
the networks and devices that best suit their needs and that the
different technologies can be integrated easily.

I believe that this partnership, along with a slew of others recently announced (see here), will foster greater flexibility and more options for businesses and consumers.

That is why BroadSoft has established partnerships with Tandberg, IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) to name a few.  And this week we announced an extension of our partnership
with Polycom to provide an integrated voice and video solution. This
new offering builds upon our long-term relationship with Polycom and
brings video and voice together for businesses in a way that has not
been readily available before. More often than not, video and voice
live in separate silos at businesses, making it difficult for employees
to leverage these tools simultaneously for the next generation of
telepresence. Through our new solution, V2Connect, we bring video and
voice together in one infrastructure so workers can take advantage of
these tools easily and seamlessly and businesses – including SMBs –can
potentially save money and increase productivity.

At the core of all these partnerships is Unified Communications,
enabling employees to communicate through various channels, at any
time, from any location and in an integrated, streamlined way. For
example, through our collaboration with Polycom, businesses have access
to unified voice and video solutions delivered as a hosted service. Our
integrated UC solution with Microsoft facilitates integrated voice,
presence, instant messaging and web conferencing as a hosted solution,
so that employees can work virtually, from any location and at any time.

Moving forward, we expect to see rapid expansion in the hosted UC
market. As more businesses shift to a hosted model, the need for plug
and play technologies will likely increase.