HP today announced a broad new partnership with Polycom and as part of this agreement Polycom will acquire all of the assets of HP’s Visual Collaboration Business, including HP’s Halo products and managed services. Under the agreement, Polycom will serve as HP’s exclusive partner for telepresence and certain Video UC (unified communications) solutions.
The strategic agreement gives our customers access to a broader video portfolio and feature set and a faster path to interoperability – coupled with the global reach and scale of HP. They will benefit from the strength of the combined portfolio, with Polycom delivering video conferencing products and infrastructure and HP delivering related hardware, networking, servers, storage and global services.
Together Polycom and HP offer industry standard, scalable video and UC solutions, allowing us to provide our customers with the best solution at lower cost than alternatives in the market.
Although we are exiting the product side of the business, we are committed to growing our networking and services business in video conferencing. HP Technology Services and HP Enterprise Services will continue to sell the Visual Collaboration products as part of the Polycom product line.
Existing HP and Polycom customers will benefit from this transaction and alliance because they will receive the focus of two world-class technology companies through greater service and product opportunities.
HP will lead the evolution of connectivity to define the future of the industry. Nobody is better positioned than HP to succeed in the connected world.
(The acquisition is subject to standard regulatory approvals and we expect the deal to close in Q3 2011. Both companies will continue to operate separately until close.)
The release: http://www.polycom.com/company/news_room/press_rel
The HP Visual Collaboration team is happy to have among us the lead for many philanthropic events at the San Diego site. Rachael Perez takes special care to promote technology and education among the Hispanic community of school kids. HP held such an event last week, hosting 100 kids, largely from San Diego's Barrio Logan along with 79 HP employees' kids.
The BEST PART OF THE DAY by far, said the kids via email after the event, was the HP Visual Collaboration Halo demonstration!
Desiderio – “I think the best thing in there was the Halo rooms because people from far away could talk to you or you could talk with friends.”
Briana – “Thank you for letting us go on that field trip. It was fun. I liked the part where we went to the Halo room because we could talk and see other people from other places.”
Victoria – “When we went on the field trip, I liked the Halo room because you could talk to others from far away.”
Paola – “I really enjoyed the Halo room. It was fun seeing my friends from the other group and saying things to them. I had a really good time. Thank you.”
Lizbeth – “The Halo room was cool because you could see other groups on the screen and they taught us how to connect with other people on the screen.”
Eunice – “I really like the Halo rooms because it is amazing that people can talk all over the world.”
Fernanda – “The one I liked the most was the Halo room, because it was so funny and cool seeing other people from all the way to the other building.”
Emily – “The thing that I liked about the field trip was the Halo rooms. I thought it was so cool because we got to see the other group.”
Jhouvanny – I really enjoyed the Halo room because you can communicate with other people from all over the world, LIVE. Also because it is like a meeting room.”
Efrain – “I enjoyed the Halo room because they made a comic, for example they made the picture frame of Sponge Bob Square Pants. The frame was awesome!”
Mauro – “The most fun thing that we did at HP was the Halo rooms. They were the most fun and exciting. We got to see our friends through a screen and they saw us. We also played games.”
Thanks kids!
For a country (and state) that needs more engineers, scientists and mathematicians - HP hopes such events bring kids the inspiration they need to work hard in school - and be tomorrow's entrepreneurs!
HP customers stranded by the recent eruption of the Icelandic volcano Grimsvotn will be able to use HP’s Visual Collaboration Halo 
According to Rob Scott, vice president and worldwide general manager of HP Visual Collaboration, “HP wants to give stranded customers the ability to continue mission-critical business. The studios provide a high level of business continuity, preventing loss of productivity and, in many cases, the lost revenues that others are facing in the current gridlocked travel situation.”
HP also offered its Visual Collaboration studios to customers last year during the volcanic ash cloud incident in April 2010.
Have you been impacted by the most recent ash cloud? How are you working around the potential delays?
One year ago, HP and others in the videoconferencing and Unified Communications industry formed the UCIF to begin to tackle issues of multi-vendor islands that were holding back UC. The group agreed to use existing standards, not form new ones, and to get started on some interoperability work.
Founders included HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech / LifeSize, and Polycom.
The organization, now 39 members strong, represents all elements of the UC industry from networking to PBX systems, video to cloud services, everyone sharing a vision to enable interoperability of standards-based UC hardware and software across enterprises, service providers and consumer clouds.
Earlier this month, UCIF received great news when the UCIF USB Webcam recommendation was adopted by the USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) Video Work Group and submission of the completed specification was delivered to the USB-IF board. And while we’re extremely happy that we were able to complete this important task, there is more work to be done this year.
One major priority for 2011 is select test labs for our certification program. The Test & Certification task group will soon be issuing an RFP to equipment testing vendors in order to select a set of UCIF approved test labs. The selected test labs will report back to UCIF on the vendors’ ability to complete a testing profile. If successful, a UCIF mark will be issued for the tested companies’ products. Technical work is underway to create profiles that will be submitted to labs and used as the foundation for interoperability testing.
Additionally, UCIF has already created task groups for H.264/SVC Profile, Endpoint Provisioning, and USB Audio and study groups for Voice and Instant Messaging and Presence and we look forward to sharing more information about their progress in coming months.
For more information, please check out the resources below. Thanks to those who joined the UCIF this year and participated!!!
HP Visual Collaboration's own Chief Scientist Mark Gorzynski is the vice president of the UCIF board of directors. Shoot Mark a line here at "Virtually Speaking."
For more:
HP Visual Collaboration: http://www.hp.com/go/visual-collaboration/
UCIF Website: http://www.ucif.org/
UCIF Whitepaper: "UC, Driving the Next Step to Interoperability"
UCIF Blog: http://uciforum.wordpress.com/
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Please send your comments and ask us how you can get involved today!
Mark and Karin
At this week’s Interop 2011 event, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel about “Future Directions of Telepresence” alongside industry colleagues from BurstPoint, Cisco and High Speed Video. The panel was moderated by John Bartlett, a voice, video and data application performance analyst at NetForecast.
This discussion focused on the continual evolution of collaborative communications and specifically the transition from videoconferencing to telepresence and the future applications for these technologies. Moving forward, I anticipate that we’ll see three trends that will impact the telepresence market.
Today’s technologies enabling better price points, could bring video to every employee who wants it. This is now possible and attributable to software-based technologies and new codecs such as SVC. Because of these advancements more people in the workplace (and outside of it) will have access to enterprise quality video conferencing. Add to that, the demand for mobile, which will drive video communications to even more people and devices. I believe that having video on the handset will evolve the same way mobile phones grew popular despite more mature and “bullet proof” landlines – meaning that the convenience of having it anywhere, anytime in the form factor users want (mobile phone) will attract users who will simply deal with any “learning curves” carriers may face in its delivery.
Best, Marcio
To learn more about the HP Visual Collaboration Solutions demonstrated at Interop 2011, please visit www.hp.com/go/visual-collaboration.
