Microsoft and Polycom Partner for Collaboration Solutions

September 14, 2004  - (HostReview.com) -  Microsoft Corp. and Polycom Inc. (www.polycom.com) announced a multiyear joint marketing and development agreement to deliver business-quality, rich collaboration solutions across communication devices, applications and services that will empower customers to connect and share information in real-time regardless of location or type of call.

"Information workers are looking for collaboration solutions that make it simple to initiate rich multimedia communication sessions while seamlessly bringing together the investments they have already made in hardware, software and services," said Anoop Gupta, corporate vice president of the Real-Time Collaboration Group at Microsoft.

The initial offering, currently scheduled for release in late 2004, combines the presence awareness and instant messaging capabilities of Microsoft® Office Live Communications Server and Windows® Messenger with Polycom's widely installed ViewStation EX, FX and VSX desktop and group video conference systems; SoundPoint and SoundStation IP handsets and conference phones; MGC voice and video bridges; and the WebOffice conference portal.

"Polycom's mission is to deliver standards-based converged voice, video, Web and data communications instantly through a virtual experience as natural as being there," said Bob Hagerty, chairman and CEO of Polycom.

Expanding on the agreement, Microsoft and Polycom will each deploy the co-developed solutions to extend the benefits of standards-based convergence of people, applications, devices and services to each company's employees globally.

Enabling interoperability between Polycom's market-leading conferencing bridges, conferencing software, voice and video endpoint systems with Microsoft's real-time collaboration software and services will give IT administrators a richer, end-to-end media infrastructure, with emphasis on reliability, scalability and security.