Ericsson and Polycom announce new collaboration

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Ericsson and Polycom announced a collaboration around an integrated end-to-end solution for hosted telepresence services that will enable telecom operators to deliver affordable, high-definition visual communications services to businesses and consumers.

During the event, Ericsson and Polycom are previewing integration between the Ericsson IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) network and Polycom infrastructure and telepresence endpoints, in a first step in collaboration between the companies.

The collaboration between Polycom and Ericsson responds to the rising adoption rates and increasing customer demand across enterprises of all size, and will extend visual communications as a truly global mass market service.

The new solutions are based on the standardised IMS technology, the same underlying technology used by telecom operators today.

“Availability of visual communications as an affordable, reliable and high-quality service through telecom operators will help usher in global, mainstream adoption,” says Joe Burton, Chief Technology and Strategy Officer, Polycom. “Furthering our UC Everywhere and cloud strategies, Polycom is excited to collaborate with Ericsson around standards-based solutions with the open interoperability needed to easily connect people across devices and networks.”

“Ericsson believes in visual communications,” says Magnus Furustam, Vice President and Head of Core and IMS at Ericsson. “The preview at MWC is a first significant proof point of Ericsson and Polycom cooperation to create an interoperable end-to-end solution for mass market deployment, enabling telecom operators to offer network-based video services to business users and consumers.”