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Polycom Acquires Accordent — A Marriage Of Real And Archived Video

Posted by Henry Dewing on March 23, 2011

  • 253 Recommendations

Polycom announced today (March 23, 2011) that it is acquiring Accordent Technologies. The acquisition extends Polycom’s portfolio of video technologies and products and enables Accordent to leverage Polycom’s global distribution capabilities. Accordent is a privately held, 11-year old company based in El Segundo, California and has 52 employees. Accordent’s aim of delivering future-focused video collaboration has earned the trust of 1,200 customers who use their video archiving and streaming solutions. Polycom and Accordent share:

  • A common focus on unified communications and collaboration (UC&C). They both work with a stable of technology and services partners to deliver these rich experiences to market. Common partners like HP, IBM, Microsoft and Riverbed will smooth the companies’ continuing sales to Fortune 500 companies that are already using or considering their solutions for video.
  • A tight relationship with Microsoft. Both companies have deep technical and go-to-market relationships with various business units in Redmond driving collaborative work with server platforms including the Microsoft Windows Media Server, Microsoft Lync Server, Microsoft SharePoint Server, and others.
  • A deep understanding of the adoption of video in the market. Both companies have focused efforts to understand both the horizontal use cases for video (creative collaboration sessions, large-scale status reporting meetings, and ad hoc video communications) as well as industry-specific uses in verticals like healthcare, education, and government.
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It’s Sunny In Florida – And It’s Cloudy At Enterprise Connect

Posted by Henry Dewing on March 4, 2011

  • 238 Recommendations

Before I left for Enterprise Connect this week, I had completed nearly a dozen pre-briefings and tweeted that I expected to see themes including cloud, collaboration, interoperability, mobility, SMB, social, and video. All those topics have been covered and re-covered — and they have often overlapped. As I attended sessions, visited vendors on the floor, and met on-on-one with unified communications and collaboration (UC&C) vendors and service providers, I heard echoes of my late 2008 report, “The Broad Opportunities In Managed Services,” where I highlighted tight credit, rapid technology change, and uncertain business volumes with creating unique opportunities for managed services from onsite management through the then new concept of software-as-a-service (SaaS). This brought cloud and as-a-Service topics to the front of almost every conversation and announcement. Vendors are pursuing this opportunity that we continue to see growing in our surveys, with only 3% of IT buyers in North America and Europe reporting that they currently deploy or manage their unified communications in an as-a-service model; but 23% are interested in doing so in the future.* Vendors from CallTower to AT&T (although neither was at the show) are offering services, and several new cloud announcements were made at the show.

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